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 ...

At 25, Kurt Gödel proved there can never be a mathematical “theory of everything.” Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores the ...

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

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

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 ...

Metal-eating microbes get energy from rocks and could teach us about life on other worlds — but first scientists had to learn how to grow them in the lab. Jeanette Kazmierczak was Quanta's editorial ...

In the fall of 2022, a Princeton University graduate student named Carolina Figueiredo stumbled onto a massive coincidence. She calculated that collisions involving three different types of subatomic ...

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with critical stores of carbon at stake.

If we want to understand complex constructions, such as ourselves, assembly theory says we must account for the entire history of how such entities came to be. Life on other worlds — if it exists — ...