For decades, physicists have argued about Feynman’s Sprinkler Problem, the question of how a reverse sprinkler would operate.

A team of mathematicians from US universities has solved the Sprinkler Problem, a decades-old physics mystery regarding how a ...

If there is one area in which the schools have performed less well in serving her children, who just completed eighth grade, ...

The MIT Sports Lab helped develop a tool referees used to make clutch calls at the last World Cup, but their ongoing work with FIFA is just one of many collaborations with heavy hitters in sports.

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, ...

Los Angeles has been the world’s entertainment capital for 100 years. Efforts are under way to stop the exodus, but is it enough?

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 ...

The percentage of failing grades in multiple UC Berkeley computer science classes in spring 2026 is significantly higher than past semesters and marks a departure from the department’s grading ...

Getting this crew to agree that the state’s health care system is broken was easy. Getting them to agree on solutions? That’s a little tougher. The Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation ...

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 ...