Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what ...

By replacing the most fundamental concept in topology, Peter Scholze and Dustin Clausen are taking the first step in a far ...

At 25, Kurt Gödel proved there can never be a mathematical “theory of everything.” Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores the ...

Rubin Observatory in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Originally imagined in the mid-1990s as the Dark Matter ...

The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy ...

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.

Those scientists saved countless lives, but their forecast was more of an educated guess than it might have appeared. It was ...

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without sustaining damage from dangerously intense rays. Living on light is a dangerous ...

Neutrinos have about as little influence as a particle can have. They have essentially no heft, no electric charge, and no “color” charge. As a result, the neutrino has no connection with most of ...

Off the coast of Japan, biologists netted a pea-size jellyfish with an unusual circadian clock — a chance finding that suggests there are likely more overlooked biological timekeeping mechanisms to be ...

There’s a moment, just before the tight mass of cells that is a developing mouse embryo implants itself in the womb, that it all comes apart. Hundreds of tiny fluid-filled bubbles expand between each ...

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others.