Stories by Davide Castelvecchi

My first encounter with higher dimensions was somewhat of an anticlimax. It was one of my very first days in university, back in Rome, and I was sitting in an amphitheaterlike classroom, in one of the classes required of all first-year math students.

A century after the discovery of materials that conduct electricity without resistance, the applications remain disappointingly limited. That may be about to change

Mathematicians unearth fractal counting patterns to explain a cryptic claim

For starters, retrofits could make U.S. reactors safer--and maybe even make nuclear power more palatable

His discovery that some seven-dimensional spheres look different under the lens of calculus spurred decades of research in topology

Scientists use light to make worms start, stop and lay eggs

Physicists have brought a 19th-century thought experiment to life

Low-cost spacecraft called CubeSats are helping bring open-source, DIY culture to spaceflight

Newly discovered counting patterns explain and elaborate cryptic claims made by the self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in 1919

Video taken by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft reveals evidence of three volcanoes that appear to be gushing liquid water through the moon's icy surface. The activity could be a source replenishing the methane in Titan's atmosphere, which is broken down by sunlight

Scientific American presents this year's winning micro-imaging entries from the Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Contest