Published January 7 in the journal Nature, one paper tackled the age-old problem of nature’s construction with a bit of a twist: it suggests that living networks, like our brain, may use some of the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. An artist’s rendition of a multibranched network of neurons. Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter from Scientific ...

String theory began over 50 years ago as a way to understand the strong nuclear force. Since then, it’s grown to become a theory of everything, capable of explaining the nature of every particle, ...

One of the most striking outcomes of the surface-minimization framework is its ability to explain structural features that ...

But despite its extraordinary popularity among some of the smartest people on the planet, string theory hasn’t been embraced by everyone–and now, nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash, some ...

String theory attempts to unify all forces and particles in the universe using vibrating strings. It aims to explain the Standard Model of particle physics, which is incomplete. String theory predicts ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. String theory captured the hearts and minds of many physicists decades ago because of a beautiful simplicity. Zoom in far enough on a ...

String theory proposes that the fundamental constituents of the universe are one-dimensional “strings” rather than point-like particles. What we perceive as particles are actually vibrations in loops ...