Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses.

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that ...

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open ...

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

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture.

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life.

Extreme microorganisms carpeting the Atacama Desert in Chile illuminate how life might have first taken hold on Earth’s surface.

By translating symbolic math into tree-like structures, neural networks can finally begin to solve more abstract problems.