One of the longest-standing questions in biology is how a living thing that starts as an embryonic blob of uniform cells morphs over time...

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in...

The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans....

Imagine 100 dots scattered in front of you. In a haphazard variation on connect-the-dots, start drawing lines between the points. How many lines can...

Perhaps the most famously weird feature of quantum mechanics is nonlocality: Measure one particle in an entangled pair whose partner is miles away, and...

In geometry and the closely related field of topology, adding a spatial dimension can often have wondrous effects: Previously distinct objects become indistinguishable. But...

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,”...

As the atoms of arithmetic, prime numbers have always occupied a special place on the number line. Now, Jared Duker Lichtman, a 26-year-old graduate...

Today, more than three years after the release of the first-ever image of a black hole, scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) shared...

For scientists studying de-extinction — the ambitious effort to resurrect extinct species — a paper that appeared in Current Biology in March was a...

The American mathematician invented entire new ways to understand shapes and spaces.

The post Dennis Sullivan, Uniter of Topology and Chaos, Wins the Abel Prize first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Physicists are devising clever new ways to exploit the extreme sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. But so far, they’ve seen no signs of exotica.

The post A New Tool for Finding Dark Matter Digs Up Nothing first appeared on Quanta Magazine