The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Science, MIT Technology Review, and Live Science. She studied journalism ...

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

Condensed matter physics is the most active field of contemporary physics and has yielded some of the biggest breakthroughs of the past century. Now for the first time, Jie Shan and Fai Mak, a husband ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. In 360 BCE, Plato envisioned the cosmos as an ...

Mathematicians and computer scientists answered major questions in topology, set theory and even physics, even as computers continued to grow more capable.

For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. We’d like to take a moment to recognize some of these achievements.

Po-Shen Loh believes math education needs an overhaul. And he knows a thing or two about it—he’s resurrected the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team, leading it to four first-place… ...

Throughout nature, throngs of relatively simple elements can self-organize into behaviors that seem unexpectedly complex. Scientists are beginning to understand… ...

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia is now revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. The year’s biggest computer science ...