Those scientists saved countless lives, but their forecast was more of an educated guess than it might have appeared. It was ...

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without ...

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also ...

Remarkably preserved fossils found in southern China offer a fascinating window into what life looked like at the end of the ...

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily. How do mathematicians decide that something ...

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond. His two theorems destroyed the search ...

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry. The theoretical physicist and ...

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism. Intuition ...

Neurons that fire together, wire together” is not the full story. A novel mechanism explains how the brain can learn across ...

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. Each of us starts ...