Quanta

Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time. That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, […]

Emerging data suggests the seemingly impossible — that mysterious new genes arise from “junk” DNA.

Is geology predictable, or is the mineral composition of Earth due to chance events? The answers could eventually help scientists identify planets likely to harbor life.

Researchers are uncovering the hidden laws that reveal how the Internet grows, how viruses spread, and how financial bubbles burst.

In the quest for a unified, coherent description of all of nature — a “theory of everything” — physicists have unearthed the taproots linking ever more disparate phenomena.

A new technique for finding and characterizing microbes has boosted the number of known bacteria by almost 50 percent, revealing a hidden world all around us.

A 115-year effort to bridge the particle and fluid descriptions of nature has led mathematicians to an unexpected answer.

Scientists hope that new genetic letters, created in the lab, will endow DNA with new powers.

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks.