Lifelike biochemistry continued to unfold in sterilized soil for six years, pointing to a metabolic theory for how biology began. For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The ...

Over hundreds of years, increasingly sophisticated instruments have revealed — and continue to reveal — the secrets of our star.

Earth’s largest volcanic system, hidden in mountain chains under the sea, has long been assumed to erupt only quietly. The ...

Evolutionary biologists are uncovering genomic mechanisms that allow populations to adapt quickly to different, hyperlocal ...

Grothendieck is revered in the world of math; outside of it, he’s known for his unusual life, if he’s known at all. But what ...

By replacing the most fundamental concept in topology, Peter Scholze and Dustin Clausen are taking the first step in a far ...

In the summer of 1991, Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, self-destructed. The eruption started on June 12, and three days later it culminated in a tremendous explosion. By the time pyroclastic ...

Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out the ...

Around the world, volcanologists are following the path of magma as it travels between connected volcanoes, in an effort that could lead to improved eruption forecasts. In the summer of 1912, word ...

At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and ...