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 ...

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

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

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

It can be hard to tell, at first, when a cell is on the verge of self-destruction. It appears to be going about its usual business, transcribing genes and making proteins. The powerhouse organelles ...

Early Signals One of the most striking examples of how metabolism can drive cell differentiation comes from a humble slime mold. When Dictyostelium has plenty of nutrients in its environment, it ...

Despite some reservations about the label “social,” other scientists generally agree that understanding the bustling signaling networks that mitochondria establish within and between cells could help ...

A New Paradox of Black Holes In the mid-20th century, black holes were mysterious because of their “singularity” at their core, a place where infalling matter becomes infinitely compacted, gravity ...

But the new approaches do more than just speed up the process. For some phenomena, researchers only have data and little idea of how to even come up with the relevant PDEs to model them. “There are ...