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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“For the longest time, it was thought that this is the center of cognition, and you need this kind of anatomy to develop advanced cognitive abilities,” said Bastienne Zaremba, a postdoctoral ...

Also under discussion is whether it picks up waste on the way out of the brain and, crucially, how. There is good evidence that small molecules, at least, can diffuse through the spaces between cells, ...

The concept of a concept cell was a joke to neuroscientists — until it wasn’t. In 1969, the neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin gave what became a famous lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...

How do you prove something is true? For mathematicians, the answer is simple: Start with some basic assumptions and proceed, step by step, to the conclusion. QED, proof complete. If there’s a mistake ...