Today’s AI is still unreliable. Some researchers think solving that problem requires teaching AI systems to understand the world around them.

Ching-Yao Lai, an assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford University, works to advance scientific understanding of ice ...

We have spent years testing AI models on document extraction. Not edge cases—invoices. The simplest version of the task: read ...

Nothing rivals the human brain's complexity. Its 86 billion neurons and 85 billion other cells make an estimated 100 trillion ...

From fractions and decimals to distance and time, the humble-but-versatile number line can deepen students’ understanding of ...

Can idiosyncratic risk explain the equity premium? We revisit this question using a novel measure of imperfect risk sharing, implied by a large class of heterogeneous-agent models, constructed using ...

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 Pro has solved an open mathematical problem that human researchers could not crack since 2019, according to independent verification by Epoch AI. Contributed by mathematicians Will ...

You’re never too old to learn something new. People are losing their minds over how simple — yet tricky — an elementary school-level math equation posted on X (formerly Twitter) is. Over the weekend, ...

Fermat’s Last Theorem is one of the most famous problems in mathematical history. Proposed in the 17th century, it claimed that certain equations have no solutions in whole numbers. For centuries, ...

Corrected: A previous version of this story should have said that the Pew Research Center conducted the survey. There’s fear among many educators that most students are now using AI to do too much of ...

Over the past couple of months, several researchers have begun making the same provocative claim: They used generative-AI tools to solve a previously unanswered math problem. The most extreme promises ...