C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his ...

Scientists assumed that energy flows in only one direction in a turbulent system. What they didn’t know, until they looked closely at brine shrimp, was that a simple factor can reverse the flow.

The collective electrical activity of many neurons can be seen as waves propagating through the brain from one region to the ...

In my first months as a physics journalist nearly a decade ago, I kept running into an inscrutable string of characters: AdS/CFT. Thoroughly intimidated, I decided to just ignore it. But I couldn’t ...

Hidden correspondences hint at a deeper structure to the mathematical universe. Our columnist unpacks one of those connections and asks mathematicians what they might mean. The mathematical universe ...

A simple scaling law brings order to the chaos of flowing water, rock, and sediment. New findings have extended the law even further. A river has my heart. It’s not the austere, black Thames winding ...

Focus, commitment, and insight resulted in a “once in a century” proof. Hong Wang is now just the third woman to win a Fields Medal. No error was found, the proof ...

At first, scientists thought Earth’s water came from comets. Then, asteroids. Now, they wonder if Earth’s water is homegrown. For decades, NASA’s exploration of the solar system has been dominated by ...

With automated proof-checkers, a problem can be broken up into small chunks, solved bit-by-bit, then reassembled with confidence that every piece is correct. For some, this heralds a new area in ...

Lifelike biochemistry continued to unfold in sterilized soil for six years, pointing to a metabolic theory for how biology began. Siddhant Pusdekar is a London-based freelance writer with a Ph.D. in ...