What We're Reading

Peter Lax, an innovator in applied mathematics who left Hungary during World War II and worked on U.S. atomic bomb calculations as a college student while developing equations that would later influence fields such as medicine and weather forecasting, died May 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

The Perimeter Institute is like a concert hall where the deepest symphonies of nature are composed and performed.

This year will be a big one for quantum computing, at least according to the United Nations: 2025 is officially the “International Year of Quantum Science and Technology,” a worldwide initiative to raise awareness of technological progress and encourage new advances.

The cloud, named Eos, is chock-full of molecular hydrogen and possibly rife with star-forming potential in the future.

Over the past decade, two very different ways of calculating the rate at which the universe is expanding have come to be at odds, a disagreement dubbed the Hubble tension, after 20th-century astronomer Edwin Hubble. Experts have speculated that this dispute might be temporary, stemming from subtle shortcomings in observations or analyses that will eventually be corrected rather than from some flawed understanding of the physics of the cosmos. Now, however, a new study that relies on an independent measure of the properties of galaxies has strengthened the case for the tension. Quite possibly, it’s here to stay.

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

The oceans teem with photosynthesizing bacteria, tiny-tailed dinoflagellates gobbling other plankton, algae surrounded by intricate glass skeletons. In the 1960s, the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson pointed out something confusing: why do so many kinds of plankton exist?

Penn physicist Randall Kamien, visiting scholar Lauren Niu, and collaborator Geneviève Dion of Drexel bring unprecedented levels of predictability to the ancient practice of knitting by developing a mathematical model that could be used to create a new class of lightweight, ultra-strong materials.

Princeton geoscientists Xinning Zhang and Ashley Maloney have discovered that a geology technique shows promise in detecting cancer-like cells. If their preliminary results bear out, they may have identified a new signature for cancer, which could mean earlier diagnosis and better outcomes.

Renowned cosmologist David Spergel joins Brian Greene to discuss the triumphs and tensions of precision cosmology, exploring remarkable successes as well as persistent discrepancies bedeviling current understanding.