Despite their wide variety of sizes, niches and shapes, sharks scale geometrically, pointing to possible fundamental ...

To see how one cube can pass through another, imagine holding a cube over a table and examining its shadow (assuming it’s ...

The recent paper studies algorithmic pricing through the lens of game theory, an interdisciplinary field at the border of ...

Neuroscientists probing the boundary between sleep and awareness are finding many types of liminal states, which help explain ...

The math of even the simplest ocean waves is notoriously uncooperative. A team of Italian mathematicians has made major ...

The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The ...

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...

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. The Facility for Rare ...

In 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 ...

Spin glasses might turn out to be the most useful useless things ever discovered. These materials — which are typically made of metal, not glass — exhibit puzzling behaviors that captivated a small ...