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

Eric James Beyer is a science writer whose work explores the intersections of technology, the natural world, and human identity. He has written for Interesting Engineering, The Bosphorus Review ...

A new argument explores how the growth of disorder could cause massive objects to move toward one another. Physicists are ...

Physicists recently mapped the hidden shape that underlies the quantum behaviors of a crystal, using a new method that’s expected to become ubiquitous. Famously, at the quantum scale, particles can be ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder calculated in 1939 that if a perfectly spherical star gravitationally collapses to a point, its matter will become so dense that it will stretch space-time ...

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 ...

The recent spate of discoveries has both compounded the mystery of superconductivity and heightened the optimism. “It seems to be, in materials, that superconductivity is everywhere,” said Matthew ...

Dictionary of Duality . To see how two theories can secretly say the same things, you need a dictionary to translate between them. The rabbit-duck dictionary, for instance, would establish that “ear” ...

The year’s biggest computer science stories included a new understanding of large language models, and a breakthrough in being able to compute complex quantum systems. We look back at three of the ...

String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a patch of space, the theory says, and you won’t see a menagerie of ...

Tunneling was not enough, Anderson argued in a 1958 paper.A disordered landscape of any dimension would “localize” a particle. The work went essentially unread for years, although it would eventually ...