Quanta

The mathematician Ken Ono believes that the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan — mathematical savant and two-time college dropout — holds valuable lessons for how we find and reward hidden genius.

An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe.

Huge supercolliders aren’t the only way to search for new physical phenomena. A new generation of experiments that can fit on a tabletop are probing the nature of dark matter […]

A new study reveals that individual genes can create many different versions of the molecular machinery that powers the cell.

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

A race to decipher the brain’s algorithms could revolutionize machine learning.

The Go-playing program captures elements of human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

The biochemist David Deamer proposes that life evolved from a collection of interacting molecules, probably in a pool in the shadow of a volcano.