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 ...

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.

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.

Scientists assumed that energy flows in only one direction in a turbulent system. What they didn’t know, until they looked closely at brine shrimp, was that a simple factor can reverse the flow.

The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The ...

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 ...

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.