Stories by Joseph Howlett

Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard, winners of the latest Turing Award, spent their lives touting the advantages of the quantum world

More than 1,500 mathematicians are demanding that their field’s most prestigious meeting be moved from the U.S.

A new challenge reveals how well AI can tackle true math problems

The decades since scientists confirmed the first planet around another star have been rich in discovery, but it’s rare to see a new solar system as it forms

The Mordell conjecture—now known as Faltings’s theorem—concerns the number of special points on a curve

The stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud aren’t behaving the way they should. A cataclysmic collision with another nearby galaxy may be the culprit

By plying its ground-penetrating radar in the depths of Mars’s Jezero Crater, this rover has found even older deltas buried beneath those seen on the surface from space

First Proof is an effort to see whether LLMs can contribute meaningfully to pure mathematics research. The dust has settled on round one, and the results are surprising

A new study explains how some supernovae are particularly dazzling—the glow from a magnetic, spinning ball of neutrons called a magnetar. An assist from Einstein is what settled the case

Why measles cases are rising in the U.S., how artificial intelligence is shaping warfare, and what accelerated global warming means for the world

A team at IBM Research has assembled a strange new ring-shaped molecule that bends around like a more complicated Möbius strip

This weekend will offer a chance to see a rare celestial event—Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all aligned in the sky like beads on a string

A new study explains why basketball shoes make a high-pitched squeaking noise when they rub against the hardwood. The ridges on their sole hold the key

Since ancient Greece, researchers have tried to isolate special rational points on curves. Now they have the first ever formula that applies uniformly to all curves

Blizzards are a real-life example of what game theorists call the “snowdrift problem,” a cousin of the prisoner’s dilemma that offers clues to why we choose to cooperate

A study published today helps explain how “planetesimals”—the building blocks of planets—came to be

Experts gave AI 10 math problems to solve in a week. OpenAI, researchers and amateurs all gave it their best shot

LLMs have recently helped find solutions to a number of minor longstanding problems. But a new plan called First Proof is really putting them to the test

Frustrated by the AI industry’s claims of proving math results without offering transparency, a team of leading academics has proposed a better way

After 25 years, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider—the U.S.’s largest and only particle collider—has ceased operations, but its science lives on

Researchers have found what might be a little red dot transitioning into its final state, where x-rays burst through its gas cocoon. Others argue the object is nothing special

The sun is experiencing a violent solar storm, releasing one of the strongest solar flares seen in the past 30 years

An exoplanet called HD 137010 b might be the closest thing astronomers have ever seen to “Earth 2.0.” The trouble is that it’s only been seen once—and may never be glimpsed again

A century ago, Erwin Schrödinger came up with an equation that says how the quantum world behaves. Now scientists are asking what happens when the observer is part of that world