Quanta

Lisa Manning, an associate professor of physics at Syracuse University, is widely admired for her success in using insights from physics to explain developmental biology. As she has shown, mathematical descriptions of glassy materials can predict the dynamics of cells in embryonic tissues.

Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility.

If a forest is burning and we don’t know what’s responsible, does it have a cause?

In an era when untestable ideas such as the multiverse hold sway, Michela Massimi defends science from those who think it hopelessly unmoored from physical reality.

When a crystallographer treated prime numbers as a system of particles, the resulting diffraction pattern created a new view of existing conjectures in number theory.

Having the sense to take a shortcut, the most direct route from point A to point B, doesn’t sound like a very impressive test of intelligence. Yet according to a new report, in which researchers describe the performance of their new navigational artificial intelligence, the system’s ability to explore complex simulated environments and find the…

New observations of extreme astrophysical systems have “brutally and pitilessly murdered” attempts to replace Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The latest in a new series of proofs brings theoretical computer scientists within striking distance of one of the great conjectures of their discipline.