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

It’s surprisingly difficult to prove one of the most basic properties of a number: whether it can be written as a fraction. A broad new method can help settle this ancient question. Landmark results ...

Explore the year’s most surprising computational revelations, including a new fundamental relationship between time and space, an undergraduate who overthrew a 40-year-old conjecture, and the ...

Physicists spotted a “terribly exciting” new black hole, doubled down on weakening dark energy, and debated the meaning of ...

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 ...

Neural networks power today’s AI boom. To understand them, all we need is a map, a cat and a few thousand dimensions. Look at a picture of a cat, and you’ll instantly recognize it as a cat. But try to ...

In work that has been 30 years in the making, mathematicians have proved a major part of a profound mathematical vision called the Langlands program. A group of nine mathematicians has proved the ...

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 ...

The moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn appear to have subsurface oceans — tantalizing targets in the search for life beyond Earth. But it’s not clear why these seas exist at all. For most of ...

Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential ...

Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today. One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada leapt onto his ...

The n-queens problem is about finding how many different ways queens can be placed on a chessboard so that none attack each other. A mathematician has now all but solved it. If you have a few chess ...