Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children has ...

t started as a fantasy, then a promise — inspired by biology and animated by the ideas of physicists — and grew to become a powerful research tool. Now artificial intelligence has evolved into ...

If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any animal, plant, fungus, bacterium or virus on Earth as though it were a spiral staircase, you would always find yourself turning ...

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a ...

Artificial intelligence moves fast, so the first step in understanding it — and its role in science — is to know the lingo. From basic concepts like “neural networks” and “pretraining” to more ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

In 1917, the Japanese mathematician Sōichi Kakeya posed what at first seemed like nothing more than a fun exercise in geometry. Lay an infinitely thin, inch-long needle on a flat surface, then rotate ...

In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in ...

In a new paper, physicists argue that hypothetical particles called axions could explain why the universe isn’t empty. Physicists have long hypothesized the existence of a minuscule particle called ...

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics. When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In ...

An experiment caught a quantum system in the middle of a jump — something the originators of quantum mechanics assumed was impossible. When quantum mechanics was first developed a century ago as a ...

Quantum calculations amount to sophisticated estimates. But in 1931, Hans Bethe intuited precisely how a chain of particles would behave — an insight that had far-reaching consequences. By 1928, ...