In an old Indian parable, six blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. They disagree about what the elephant must look like: Is it smooth or rough? Is it like a snake (so thinks the man touching the trunk) or a fan (as the man touching the ear proposes)? If the blind men had combined their insights, they might have been able to give a correct...

Out of all the cells in the body, oocytes are the most patient. The immature egg cells form inside a female’s body when she’s still a fetus in her mother’s womb, and then they wait in a quiescent state for years, if not decades. Cocooned inside ovaries, they pause, neither dividing nor replicating their DNA, so that one day they may pass along pristinely...

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave....

If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed trains and enable more affordable medical technologies. For more than a century, physicists have tinkered...

Proteins are the molecular machines that sustain every cell and organism, and knowing what they look like will be critical to untangling how they function normally and malfunction in disease. Now researchers have taken a huge stride toward that goal with the development of new machine learning algorithms that can predict the folded shapes of not only...

The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999% of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, such collisions broke apart protons and neutrons to reveal the elementary particles that make them up. The discovery won the experiment’s...