A decade ago, Karen Lloyd discovered single-celled microbes living beneath the seafloor. Now she studies how they can survive ...

The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even ...

For decades, mathematicians have struggled to understand matrices that reflect both order and randomness, like those that ...

The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of ...

The quest to find the longest-running simple computer program has identified a new champion. It’s physically impossible to write out the numbers involved using standard mathematical notation.

Ben Brubaker is a staff writer covering computer science for Quanta Magazine. He previously covered physics as a freelance journalist, and his writing has also appeared in Scientific American… ...

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He has blogged about math for The New York Times and The New Yorker and has been a frequent guest on ...

The mathematicians Günter Ziegler and Martin Aigner have spent the past 20 years collecting some of the most beautiful proofs in mathematics.

Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

Strong new evidence suggests that primordial material from the planet’s center is somehow making its way out. Continent-size entities anchored to the core-mantle boundary might be involved.