About the author George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine and the author of three books: Spooky Action at a Distance, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory, and ...

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 ...

The collective electrical activity of many neurons can be seen as waves propagating through the brain from one region to the ...

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.

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition. Building a ...

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 ...

John Pavlus is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Scientific American, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Kevin Hartnett was the senior writer at Quanta Magazine covering mathematics and computer science. His work has been collected in multiple volumes of the “Best Writing on Mathematics” series.

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.

Two mathematicians have proved that a straightforward question — how hard is it to untie a knot? — has a complicated answer. Three high schoolers and their mentor revisited a century-old theorem to ...

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.