Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.

For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. We’d like to take a moment to recognize some of these achievements.

Condensed matter physics is the most active field of contemporary physics and has yielded some of the biggest breakthroughs of the past century. Now for the first time, Jie Shan and Fai Mak, a husband ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an ...

In her mind’s eye, she can see the proteins, each a ribbon of amino acids folded around itself. BMAL1 has a kind of waist that CLOCK clasps like a dancer.

A New Paradox of Black Holes. In the mid-20th century, black holes were mysterious because of their “singularity” at their core, a place where infalling matter becomes infinitely compacted, gravity ...

I n 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework ...

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could. In 2007, some of the leading ...

Editor’s note: In February 2023, a team of physicists led by Norman Yao of Harvard University published a comment about the holographic wormhole experiment described in this article. After analyzing ...