Across the social and biological sciences, statisticians use a technique that leverages randomness to deal with the unknown.

Invisibly to us, insects and other tiny creatures use static electricity to travel, avoid predators, collect pollen and more.

Until his dying days, the giant of 20th-century physics obsessed over the underpinnings of space and time, and how we can all share the same version of them. When Johnny Wheeler was 4 years old, ...

John von Neumann came about as close as humanly possible to embodying the Platonic ideal of a genius. Conversant in ancient Greek by age 6, the Hungarian made significant mathematical advances in his ...

In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic ...

Anyone who has seen the classic rabbit-duck optical illusion knows the magic and confusion of duality. One might see a duck facing to the left with its bill hanging slightly open or a rabbit with its ...

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It was already a mind-bending shift, last century, to go from Isaac Newton’s absolute space and universal time to Albert Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time, which is dynamic, flexible, sensitive ...

Karl Schwarzschild first stumbled upon black holes in 1916, but for a long time they weren’t really a thing. “Black holes were discovered as a purely geometric object — in a sense, just empty space.

Most of today’s leading theoretical physicists have a shared perspective about what the next revolution in physics will look like. They think reconciling Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity ...

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