Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ...

After just a few months of work, a complete newcomer to the world of sphere packing has solved one of its biggest open ...

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses.

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that ...

Scientists reconstructed 500 million years of evolutionary history to reveal which came first: colorful signals or the color ...

Quanta’s award-winning coverage of computational complexity, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, cryptography and more.

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study suggests that it’s an inevitable by-product of their architecture.

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He has blogged about math for The New York Times and The New Yorker and has been a frequent guest on ...

Physicists have ruled out a mundane explanation for the strange findings of an old Soviet experiment, leaving open the possibility that the results point to a new fundamental particle.

A growing body of work suggests that cell metabolism — the chemical reactions that provide energy and building materials — plays a vital, overlooked role in the first steps of life.