The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

Jenna Ahart is a science journalist specializing in the physical sciences. Her work has appeared in outlets such as Science, MIT Technology Review, and Live Science. She studied journalism ...

The phenomenon of criticality can explain the sudden emergence of new properties in a wide range of complex systems, from avalanches to flocks of birds to stock market crashes. Neuroscientists are now ...

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

For the first time, researchers have shown how the creativity of diffusion models can be thought of as a by-product of the denoising process itself, one that can be formalized mathematically and ...

The work demonstrates the important role of experimentation and play in research mathematics. It also has potential practical applications, such as in the design of self-righting spacecraft. “I didn’t ...

Condensed matter physics is the most active field of contemporary physics and has yielded some of the biggest breakthroughs of the past century. Now for the first time, Jie Shan and Fai Mak, a husband ...

Po-Shen Loh believes math education needs an overhaul. And he knows a thing or two about it—he’s resurrected the United States International Mathematical Olympiad team, leading it to four first-place… ...

How do extraordinarily complex emergent phenomena — like ants assembling themselves into living bridges, or tiny water and air molecules forming into swirling hurricanes — spontaneously arise from ...

It was a big year. Researchers found a way to idealize deep neural networks using kernel machines—an important step toward opening these black boxes. There were major developments toward an answer ...

We look back at three of the biggest biology stories of 2024: a reconstruction of the ancient ancestor of all modern life, the discovery of a neural circuit that regulates the immune system, and ...