Neurons that fire together, wire together” is not the full story. A novel mechanism explains how the brain can learn across ...

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the ...

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The ...

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own ...

With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex ...

Those changes will be contested, in math as in other academic disciplines wrestling with AI’s impact. As AI models become a ...

In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.

Physicists spotted a “terribly exciting” new black hole, doubled down on weakening dark energy, and debated the meaning of quantum mechanics. The supercollider is now being used to explore quantum ...

“Anomalous” heat flow, which at first appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, gives physicists a way to detect quantum entanglement without destroying it. Quantum Scientists Have Built a ...

The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared before genetic information. His ideas could lead us to think differently about aging ...

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could. In 2007, some of the leading ...