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 ...

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a ...

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 ...

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 Charlie Wood is a staff writer covering physics at Quanta Magazine. His articles about advances in the physical sciences both on and off the planet have appeared in Popular Science, ...