Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Manu Prakash’s many tools, top to bottom: a sheet of logic latches for a prototype of “thinking” materials; a glass and aluminum wheel for his new “gravity machine” microscope to map cells vertically ...

A stain drying on the counter. A raindrop splashing onto the sidewalk. A pile of gravel settling. Historically, such phenomena have rarely caught the attention of physicists, as they seem mundane and ...

And indeed, while mathematicians showed in 1984 that twisted manifolds exist in dimension 62, no one could prove that such manifolds exist in any of the remaining dimensions.As search after search ...

In 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework ...

W hen Mario Krenn was studying quantum physics at the University of Vienna, he was trained in a particular way of designing new experiments: “You go to a blackboard, and you think very hard,” he said.

On a quiet pandemic afternoon in 2021, Zhiyuan Wang, then a graduate student at Rice University, was alleviating his boredom by working on a weird mathematical problem.After he found an exotic ...

“For the longest time, it was thought that this is the center of cognition, and you need this kind of anatomy to develop advanced cognitive abilities,” said Bastienne Zaremba, a postdoctoral ...

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution. In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico ...

T he French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace crisply articulated his expectation that the universe was fully knowable in 1814, asserting that a sufficiently clever “demon” could predict the entire future ...