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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Then, about 130 million years ago, it appears that animals started using colors to ward off predators. That’s when the first hint of warning coloration appears in the fossil record, in a cockroach ...

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 ...

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 ...