A collision may have left these galaxies without dark matter. That spells trouble for alternative gravity theories.

C.H. Waddington’s powerful image of embryonic stem cells specializing on a rolling landscape has captivated biologists since the 1950s. Experimental data is finally confirming, and complicating, his ...

Lauren Williams tells 'The Joy of Why' how studying a fundamental object in algebraic combinatorics led to a career full of surprises.

A mathematical mechanism enables AI models to process language at scale, undergirding the current AI revolution. Our ...

In this special live recording from the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, July 2026, the central question discussed was what do mathematicians really value about doing ...

For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence ...

The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers.

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks. The Quanta Newsletter ...

Explore a shape that can’t pass through itself, a teenage prodigy, and two new kinds of infinity. Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta ...

The theoretical computer scientist behind the influential Unique Games Conjecture delights in the wonders of New York’s Washington Square Park, where he ponders the impossible.

In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 ...