The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals. “Not reliably,” Hurst said. “I don’t think it’s totally ...

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called ...

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new ...

A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to be equivalent to many complex mathematical ...

Baez called for the development of new mathematics — he called it “green” math — to better capture the workings of Earth’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Is the inside of a vision model at all like a language model? Researchers argue that as the models grow more powerful, they may be converging toward a singular “Platonic” way to represent the world.