Cells in the placenta have an unusual trick for activating gentle immune defenses and keeping them turned on when no infection is present. It involves crafting and deploying a fake virus.

By bringing together disparate approaches, machines can reach a new level of creative problem-solving.

Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.

Three computer scientists have disproved a long-standing conjecture about a fundamental problem involving imperfect information.

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

How Fermat’s less famous ‘little theorem’ got mathematicians young and old to play with prime-like Carmichael numbers.

For 50 years, physicists have understood current as a flow of charged particles. But a new experiment has found that in at least one strange material, this understanding falls apart.

Paradoxically, natural selection can sometimes seem to block organisms from evolving useful adaptations. But a new study of “fitness landscapes” and antibiotic resistance in bacteria shows that life still finds a way.

Modern scientists aren’t content with predicting how life evolves. They want to shape it.

Mathematicians prove a theorem that illuminates the geometry of universes with tiny amounts of mass.

Researchers prove that navigating certain systems of vectors is among the most complex computational problems.

A century ago, the Stern-Gerlach experiment established the truth of quantum mechanics. Now it’s being used to probe the clash of quantum theory and gravity.

A team of four prominent mathematicians, including two Fields medalists, proved a conjecture described as a “holy grail of additive combinatorics.”

Erin Calipari works to understand how drugs like opioids and cocaine alter learning circuits and neurochemistry in one of the country’s epicenters of substance use disorder and addiction.

Astronomers thought they had solved the mystery of gamma-ray bursts. A few recent events suggest otherwise.

The Markov numbers reveal the secrets of irrational numbers and the patterns of the Fibonacci sequence. But there’s one question about them that has resisted proof for over a century.

Recent efforts to map every cell in the human body have researchers floored by unfathomable diversity, with many thousands of subtly different types of cells in the human brain alone.

Two researchers have improved a well-known technique for lattice basis reduction, opening up new avenues for practical experiments in cryptography and mathematics.

Just as ice melts to water, graphs undergo phase transitions. Two mathematicians showed that they can pinpoint such transitions by examining only local structure.

For the first time, scientists have decoded the molecular structure of a protein that helps to sync a biological clock to the phases of the moon.

In a year packed with fascinating discoveries, biologists pushed the limits of synthetic life, probed how organisms keep time, and refined theories about consciousness and emotional health.