As a teenager in the Czech Republic, Lenka Zdeborová glimpsed her future in an Isaac Asimov novel. A character in Asimov’s “Foundation” series invents a mathematical method for predicting the path of ...

Spin glasses might turn out to be the most useful useless things ever discovered. These materials — which are typically made of metal, not glass — exhibit puzzling behaviors that captivated a small ...

When James Clerk Maxwell set out his famous equations 150 years ago, his model of electromagnetism included a piece of pure fiction: an invisible, all-pervasive “aether” made up of elastic vortices ...

Taking a look back over the last twelve months, here are several of the biggest science stories in physics this year, as well ...