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.

Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Science, MIT Technology Review, and Live Science. She studied journalism ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

The first major progress on the rectangular peg problem was made in a proof from the late-1970s by Herbert Vaughan. The proof initiated a new way of thinking about the geometry of a rectangle and ...

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius ...

This single observation shifted the communication problem from the physical to the abstract, allowing Shannon to model the uncertainty using probability. This came as a total shock to the ...

In 2017, a team of scientists from Germany trekked to Chile to investigate how living organisms sculpt the face of the Earth. A local ranger guided them through Pan de Azúcar, a roughly ...

It is a truth of both physics and everyday experience that things fall apart. Ice melts. Buildings crumble. Any object, if you wait long enough, gets mixed up with itself and its surroundings beyond ...

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals in the deep scaffolding of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself. It’s generally ...

Editor’s note: In February 2023, a team of physicists led by Norman Yao of Harvard University published a comment about the holographic wormhole experiment described in this article. After analyzing ...

Commutative algebra is taught at the undergraduate level at only a few universities, but it is offered routinely at Princeton, which each year enrolls a handful of the most promising young math minds ...