What We're Reading

Number theorists have been trying to prove a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers, called the Riemann hypothesis, for more than 160 years. Now, mathematicians Larry Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and James Maynard of the University of Oxford have posted a sensational new finding on the preprint server arXiv.org that could be a breakthrough in making progress on resolving the conjecture.

Virola trees in Panama are defying a well-known hypothesis from the 1970s regarding tropical biodiversity, revealing how genetics and the environment shape pathogen communities and seedling survival in tropical forests

Tech-savvy creators are flocking to New Inc. The focus is less on making art than on making it in a way that provides a living.

Stony Brook University’s Simons STEM Scholars Program celebrated the signing of its second cohort of students on May 11 at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City.

Nanofluidics could be used to purify water, generate energy and build nanoscale machines. But when water flows through a carbon nanotube, classical fluid mechanics breaks down, leading to puzzling experimental findings that researchers have attributed to an effect called “quantum friction.”

For astrophysicist David Spergel, teaching at a summer school about data science in August 2023 in Ukraine was a “surreal” experience. At times, utterly normal—smart students and collegial dinners in the charming cobblestoned city of Lviv. But punctuated by sirens and cellphone alerts warning of Russian missile attacks that compelled attendees to seek refuge in bomb shelters. Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation, started to think there had to be something more the West could do to aid his Ukrainian colleagues.

Autism exists on a spectrum because it is an inherently diverse condition. It manifests everywhere, paying little mind to culture, gender, race, religion or family income. Within this magnificent diversity there is only one constant: every person with autism deserves access to dignified care and support to help them thrive.

It’s time to welcome a new type of cell to the club of living things that can harvest nitrogen from the atmosphere. Until now, the only lifeforms thought to pull nitrogen from the air and turn it into a biologically useful form were bacteria and archaea. But the discovery of a special ammonia factory inside a single-celled ocean alga adds eukaryotes — organisms with membrane-bound structures called organelles — to the list, researchers report in the April 12 Science.

It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.

Cosmologists are preparing to cast their sharpest-ever eyes on the early Universe. From an altitude of 5,300 metres on Cerro Toco, in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Simons Observatory will map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) — sometimes called the afterglow of the Big Bang — with a sensitivity up to ten times greater than that of the previous gold standard, Europe’s Planck space probe.