The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy ...

Those scientists saved countless lives, but their forecast was more of an educated guess than it might have appeared. It was ...

The sunlight-collecting organelles known as chloroplasts solve a packing problem: how to optimize photosynthesis without ...

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 ...

Remarkably preserved fossils found in southern China offer a fascinating window into what life looked like at the end of the ...

A graduate student recently harnessed the complexity of mathematical proofs to create a powerful new tool in cryptography.

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond. His two theorems destroyed the search ...

Every experience we have changes our brain, the way a ceramicist reshapes a slab of clay. Every corner we turn, every conversation we have, every shudder we feel causes cascading effects: Chemicals ...

Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out the ...

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own innate immune system. Evolutionary arms races — where one species is pitted ...

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life. You’re the earliest known life form. There’s no food around ...