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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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

Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is so widely accepted that modern mathematicians hardly think about it. But believing in its core principles didn’t come easily. How do mathematicians decide that something ...

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The recently rediscovered idea of quantum jamming complicates things. For the ...