A $1 million prize awaits anyone who can show where the math of fluid flow breaks down. With specially trained AI systems, ...

Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they ...

Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means ...

The leading approach to the simplex method, a widely used technique for balancing complex logistical constraints, can’t get any better.

Quantum mechanics has at last been formulated exclusively with real numbers, bringing a mathematical puzzle at the heart of the theory into a new era of inquiry. “Anomalous” heat flow, which at first ...

Joseph Howlett is a math writer for Quanta Magazine. His articles have been published Scientific American, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Gizmodo, among other places. He has a Ph.D.

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 most powerful formula in physics starts with a slender S, the symbol for a sort of sum known as an integral. Further along comes a second S, representing a quantity known as action. Together, ...

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience ...

Physicists have traced three of the four forces of nature — the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces — to their origins in quantum particles. But the fourth fundamental force, ...

Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly ...