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 leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

The same pulling force that causes “tears” in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It’s another example of how genes exploit ...

Anna Demming is a freelance science writer and editor based in Bristol, United Kingdom. She has a doctorate in physics from King’s College London, where her research focused on ...

The amplituhedron, a shape at the heart of particle physics, appears to be deeply connected to the mathematics of paper ...

In the third century BCE, Apollonius of Perga asked how many circles one could draw that would touch three given circles at exactly one point each. It would take 1,800 years to prove the answer: eight ...

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 ...