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.

Recent observations of an aging, alien planetary system are helping to answer the question: What will happen to our planet when the sun dies?

Artificial intelligence learned how to generate text and art better than ever before, while computer scientists developed algorithms that solved long-standing problems.

From the smallest scales to the largest, the physical world provided no shortage of surprises this year.

Landmark results in Ramsey theory and a remarkably simple aperiodic tile capped a year of mathematical delight and discovery.

Why does natural selection appear to happen slowly on long timescales and quickly on short ones? A multigenerational study of four lizard species addresses biology’s “paradox of stasis.”

Throughout her 60-year career, Lenore Blum has developed new perspectives on logic and computation while championing women in mathematics and computer science. Now consciousness is on her mind.

Last spring, scientists retrieved a trove of mantle rocks from underneath the Atlantic seafloor — a bounty that could help write the first chapter of life’s story on Earth.

Researchers are discovering the shortest knots and fattest Möbius strips, among other “optimal shapes.”

Biologists discovered that mitochondria in different tissues talk to each other to repair injured cells. When their signal fails, the biological clock starts winding down.

Locally correctable codes need barely any information to fix errors, but they’re extremely long. Now we know that the simplest versions can’t get any shorter.

In an atomically thin stack of semiconductors, a mechanism unseen in any natural substance causes electrons’ spins to align.