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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

Po-Shen Loh believes math education needs an overhaul. And he knows a thing or two about it—he’s resurrected the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team, leading it to four first-place… ...

We investigate three of 2024’s biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, including a better way to pack spheres in high dimensions, a new way to avoid forming patterns of numbers, and an 800-page proof of ...

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.

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand… ...

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. The year’s biggest computer science ...

Most organic molecules have a mirror-image twin. This concept is known as chirality. Yet life only uses one chiral molecule, not the other. The reason for this asymmetry is one of the greatest ...