Do protons live forever or do they decay with a half-life of around 16 billion trillion trillion years? That’s an eternity considering the universe is thought to be less than 14 billion years old. Yet, as Natalie Wolchover recently described, the fate of physicists’ beloved grand unification theories — the idea that the forces of nature were unified...

Rebecca Saxe’s first son, Arthur, was just a month old when he first entered the bore of an MRI machine to have his brain scanned. Saxe, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, went headfirst with him: lying uncomfortably on her stomach, her face near his diaper, she stroked and soothed him as the three-tesla magnet whirred...

Marcus Feldman never planned to end up on the front lines of evolutionary biology. “I always wanted to do mathematics, as much as I could,” he said. “There was a little bit of time when I flirted with the idea of being a psychiatrist.” More than anything else, Feldman is a polymath. His desk at Stanford University, where he has been a professor for...

If you came across an animal in the wild and wanted to learn more about it, there are a few things you might do: You might watch what it eats, poke it to see how it reacts, and even dissect it if you got the chance. Mathematicians are not so different from naturalists. Rather than studying organisms, they study equations and shapes using their own...

In August, the geologist Matt Jackson left California with his wife and 4-year-old daughter for the fjords of northwest Iceland, where they camped as he roamed the outcrops and scree slopes by day in search of little olive-green stones called olivine. A sunny young professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a uniform of pearl-snap...

In a lab buried under the Apennine Mountains of Italy, Elena Aprile, a professor of physics at Columbia University, is racing to unearth what would be one of the biggest discoveries in physics. She has not yet succeeded, even after more than a decade of work. Then again, nobody else has, either. Aprile leads the XENON dark matter experiment, one...