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

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

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 ...

Image generators are designed to mimic their training data, so where does their apparent creativity come from? A recent study ...

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

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 ...

n 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework for ...

Editor’s note: This article refers to a research study conducted by Aidan Toner-Rodgers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and posted on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org in November ...

Spin Glasses In the 1950s, scientists studying certain dilute alloys such as iron in gold realized that their samples were doing some strange things. Above a certain temperature, these alloys behave ...