Baez called for the development of new mathematics — he called it “green” math — to better capture the workings of Earth’s biosphere and climate. For his part, he sought to apply category theory, a ...

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces.

Australia.

An exploration of how mathematicians are still renovating and rebuilding the core pillars of their field today.

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In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy hills of the Atacama Desert below, but the darkness suited ...

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

But after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism, a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I’m excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful ...

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial ...

In July 2012, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought linchpin of the subatomic world. Interacting with Higgs ...

Imagine if our skies were always filled with a thick layer of opaque clouds. With no way to see the stars, or to view our planet from above, would we have ever discovered that the Earth is round? The ...