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 ...

AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into ...

Find your favorite Quanta books, apparel and more for you and the science or math people in your life.

Mounting evidence indicates that there may be multiple ways to sustain liquid-water oceans over billions of years. Decoding those recipes could accelerate our quest to determine how easy, or ...