Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a ...

The mechanical process of cell division exerts powerful, if microscopic, forces. How do the molecular machines that power it ...

Decades ago, Paul Erdős used randomness to illuminate the vast and weird world of networks. Now mathematicians are making his ...

Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the ...

Raymond Davis Jr. is dwarfed by the giant tank used by the Homestake detector in South Dakota, which first detected solar ...

For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, ...

Faced with observations of early black holes and galaxies that weren’t expected to exist, scientists have come up with a wealth of new theories to explain them. Now they just need to figure out which ...

Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA’s Wind satellite, orbiting a million miles away, he ...

Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the Earth is round? The ...

An MIT physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties. Popular hypotheses credit a primordial ...

“I’ve spent a long time exploring the crystalline beauty of traditional mathematics, but now I’m feeling an urge to study something slightly more earthy,” John Baez wrote on his blog in 2011. An ...