In science and engineering, it's unusual for innovation to come in one fell swoop. It's more often a painstaking plod through ...

A cross section of a chambered nautilus shell shows the newly defined shape, the "soft cell," repeating outward in a spiral. FlamingPumpkin via Getty Images When humans cover a space using tiles of ...

A simple question about a spinning needle has haunted mathematicians for more than a century. It led to the Kakeya conjecture ...