Pine cones. Stock-market quotations. Sunflowers. Classical architecture. Reproduction of bees. Roman poetry. What do they have in common? In one way or another, these and many more creations of nature ...

While the creation of this new entity marks a big step toward avoiding a U.S. ban, as well as easing trade and tech-related tensions between Washington and Beijing, there is still uncertainty ...

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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...

Topological Anderson insulators (TAIs) provide a mechanism for topological phase transitions in disordered systems and have implications for quantum material design. In this work, we investigate the ...

You’re at the checkout screen after an online shopping spree, ready to enter your credit card number. You type it in and instantly see a red error message ...

Do you remember the early days of social media? The promise of connection, of democratic empowerment, of barriers crumbling and gates opening? In those heady days, the co-founder of Twitter said that ...

How do the algorithms that populate our social media feeds actually work? In a piece for Time Magazine excerpted from his recent book Robin Hood Math, Noah Giansiracusa sheds light on the algorithms ...

A variation of a puzzle called the “pick-up sticks problem” asks the following question: If I have some number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of ...

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If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost.