Students are using Google Lens to cheat, kids are being taught to read by AI, and teachers are raising alarms about failing ...

The U.S. Navy has a math problem. Delays in new construction and maintenance have reduced SSN availability to less than two-thirds. At the same time, the number of available attack submarines is set t ...

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 ...

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 ...

Working memory is like a mental chalkboard we use to store temporary information while executing other tasks. Scientists worked with more than 200 elementary students to test their working memory, ...

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 ...

“If you are a mathematician,” one of the world’s leading mathematicians recently wrote, “you may want to make sure you are sitting down before reading further.” And you’ll definitely need to sit down ...

🛍️ Amazon Prime Day: The best deals chosen by our editors 🛍️ By Andrew Paul Published Apr 20, 2026 5:00 PM EDT Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred ...

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 ...

Axiom Math is giving away a powerful new AI tool. But it remains to be seen if it speeds up research as much as the company hopes. Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a ...

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 ...