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 ...

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

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 ...

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… ...

AI may sound like a human, but that doesn’t mean that AI learns like a human. In this episode, Ellie Pavlick explains why understanding how LLMs can process language could unlock deeper insights into ...

About the author Webb Wright is a journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, who writes about technology and the mind. He’s an alumnus of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a ...