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

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

For 50 years, mathematicians have believed that the total number of real numbers is unknowable. A new proof suggests otherwise. In October 2018, David Asperó was on holiday in Italy, gazing out a car ...

His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt ...

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 ...

Physical-collapse theories have long offered a natural solution to the central mystery of the quantum world. But a series of increasingly precise experiments are making them untenable. How does ...

Representation theory was initially dismissed. Today, it’s central to much of mathematics. When representation theory emerged in the late 19th century, many mathematicians questioned its worth. In ...

A popular hypothesis for how the brain clears molecular waste, which may help explain why sleep feels refreshing, is a subject of debate. Encased in the skull, perched atop the spine, the brain has a ...

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

In the 1940s, trailblazing physicists stumbled upon the next layer of reality. Particles were out, and fields — expansive, undulating entities that fill space like an ocean — were in. One ripple in a ...

The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is ...

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 ...