How physically magnifying objects using a key ingredient in diapers has opened an unprecedented view of the microbial world.

Mathematicians are still trying to understand fundamental properties of the Fourier transform, one of their most ubiquitous ...

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.

Primordial black holes could rewrite our understanding of dark matter and the early universe. A record-breaking detection at ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize ...

In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 ...

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 ...

Nearly 170 years ago, a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon ...

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 ...