Neurons that fire together, wire together” is not the full story. A novel mechanism explains how the brain can learn across ...

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the ...

With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex ...

Those changes will be contested, in math as in other academic disciplines wrestling with AI’s impact. As AI models become a ...

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The ...

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own ...

In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could. In 2007, some of the leading ...

Hundreds of physicists (and a few journalists) journeyed to Helgoland, the birthplace of quantum mechanics, and grappled with what they have and haven’t learned about reality.

In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking ...

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics. When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In ...