Physicists have debated which way a submerged sprinkler sucking in water would spin. Careful experiments provide an answer.

Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute conducted a series of experiments with different silly sprinkler ...

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New York City is facing a cash flow problem so serious — its balance could go negative in November, according to sources familiar with projections under review at City Hall. Now, Mayor Zohran ...

Artificial intelligence is mastering the kinds of projects that have long helped to build the careers of young mathematicians. What does that mean for their future? Credit...Illustrations by Yoshi ...

Think about placing dots on a flat surface. You want as many pairs as possible to be separated by the same distance. For any amount of dots, what is the greatest possible number of pairs that can be ...

“We don’t do debt anymore,” Dave Ramsey declared on a recent episode of The Ramsey Show after coaching a caller through his debt snowball method. His core philosophy is simple: Borrowing is the enemy, ...

Place any number of dots on a two-dimensional plane—say, a piece of paper—and measure the distance between each pair. If you rearrange the dots, how many pairs could be positioned exactly the same ...

In mid-May, OpenAI announced that an internal AI model had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a famous problem in discrete geometry that had stumped human mathematicians for the last 80 ...

Artificial intelligence can now solve open research-level mathematics problems — not just competition questions — and the May 2026 issue of Science News documents the moment the field registered that ...