Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
A lizard that both lays eggs and gives birth to live young is helping scientists understand how and why these forms of reproduction evolved.
Two ways of approximating the ultra-complicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts.
The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe. This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in culture, physics, timekeeping and biology.
The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.
Physicists have proposed extra cosmic ingredients that could explain the faster-than-expected expansion of space.
lack holes, by definition, are so dense that not even light can escape. But ask any astrophysicist, and they'll report that black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the universe. What's going on here?
In their search for sources of genetic novelty, researchers find that some "orphan genes" with no obvious ancestors evolve out of junk DNA, contrary to old assumptions.
Does time really flow? New clues come from a century-old approach to math.
Mathematicians have figured out how to expand the reach of a mysterious bridge connecting two distant continents in the mathematical world.
Sometimes a mirror that reflects 99.9999% of light isn't good enough.
When 50 mathematicians spend a week in the woods, there's no telling what will happen. And that's the point.
Three progressively heavier copies of each type of matter particle exist, and no one knows why — but a new paper by Steven Weinberg takes a stab at explaining the pattern.
The eye is something like a camera, but there is a whole lot more to vision than that. One profound difference is that our vision, like the rest of our senses, is malleable and modifiable by experience.
We give our genes and our environment all the credit for making us who we are. But random noise during development might be a deciding factor, too.
A study has cemented the link between an intense global warming episode 56 million years ago and volcanism in the North Atlantic, with implications for modern climate change.
"Rainbow colorings" recently led to a new proof. It's not the first time they've come in handy.
In our mind's eye, the universe seems to go on forever. But using geometry we can explore a variety of three-dimensional shapes that offer alternatives to "ordinary" infinite space.
Glass is anything that's rigid like a crystal, yet made of disordered molecules like a liquid. To understand why it exists, researchers are attempting to create the perfect, still-hypothetical "ideal glass."
To combat resistant bacteria and refill the trickling antibiotic pipeline, scientists are getting help from deep learning networks.