The library sorting problem is used across computer science for organizing far more than just books. A new solution is less ...

Individual cells in the brain light up for specific ideas. These concept neurons, once known as “Jennifer Aniston cells,” ...

In the late 19th century, Karl Weierstrass invented a fractal-like function that was decried as nothing less than a ...

Heat is supposed to ruin anything it touches. But physicists have shown that an idealized form of magnetism is heatproof.

Certain grammatical rules never appear in any known language. By constructing artificial languages that have these rules, ...

A new proof marks the first progress in decades on important cases of the so-called kissing problem. Getting there meant ...

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the astrophysicist and author Janna Levin interview leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A broad new method can help settle this ancient question. In June 1978, the ...

Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their properties in ways that physicists are still struggling to understand. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli brings to the problem a perspective ...