After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses.

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color vision needed to see them.

For the first time, researchers have shown how the creativity of diffusion models can be thought of as a by-product of the denoising process itself, one that can be formalized mathematically and ...

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe. It was minus 20 degrees Celsius ...

The approach has been fruitful. In 2022, Gore and colleagues discovered that ecological communities undergo phase transitions — a core organizing principle in physics that describes, for example, ...

Attempts at modeling gravity as a consequence of rising entropy have cropped up now and again for several decades. Entropic gravity is very much a minority view. But it’s one that won’t die, and even ...