Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Science, MIT Technology Review, and Live Science. She studied journalism ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

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 ...

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

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 ...

And indeed, while mathematicians showed in 1984 that twisted manifolds exist in dimension 62, no one could prove that such manifolds exist in any of the remaining dimensions.As search after search ...

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 ...

Hopfield started his career in the 1960s working out the physics of semiconductors. But by the end of the decade, “I had run out of problems in condensed matter physics to which my particular talents ...

S ince the start of the 20th century, the heart of mathematics has been the proof — a rigorous, logical argument for whether a given statement is true or false. Mathematicians’ careers are measured by ...

According to mathematical legend, Peter Sarnak and Noga Alon made a bet about optimal graphs in the late 1980s. They’ve now both been proved wrong. It started with a bet. In the late 1980s, at a ...

I n 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time ...