For new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines, follow NPR's ShortWave podcast . Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler conducted what became a ...

A century ago, a psychologist named Wolfgang Köhler proved that chimpanzees could solve complex problems. He hung a banana high out of reach. The chimps sat, thought, and suddenly stacked wooden boxes ...

Bumblebees faced with a challenge know how to play ball. Buff-tailed bumblebees can figure out on their own how to use a ball as a ladder to nab sugar from an out-of-reach fake flower, researchers ...

Despite having tiny brains, bumblebees have demonstrated a remarkable ability to socially learn how to use tools, solve simple puzzles, and cooperate to achieve a goal. It seems they can also solve ...

Contrary to their name, bumblebees are no bumbling oafs. A new study published in Science on Thursday found that these bees utilized tools to solve complex problems to win a sugary treat, even if they ...

Bumblebees are the brainboxes of the insect world, suggests new research. The garden pollinators are able to solve puzzles spontaneously — despite having tiny brains, scientists say. Bumblebees were ...

This illustration shows an array of integrated antennas developed by MIT researchers (right) that minimizes the unwanted crosstalk that can occur in a standard antenna array (left). This innovation ...

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 ...

“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 ...

It started almost by accident. At my startup Dwelly, I constantly push the limits of what AI tools can actually do. One day I just typed into a chat: “Can you prove P ≠ NP?”—referring to the problem ...