Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

A shard of smooth bone etched with irregular marks dating back 20,000 years puzzled archaeologists until they noticed something unique – the etchings, lines like tally marks, may have represented ...

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. We occasionally dig into our question bag, provide ...

Editor's Note: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story omitted part of the calculation for the new prime number, correctly described below as 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times ...

A new highest known prime number has been calculated, clocking in at nearly 5 million digits more than the previous record holder. Michelle Starr Science editor Michelle Starr is CNET's science editor ...

Prime numbers are beautiful and fascinating – and an infuriating puzzle. Easy to define, yet rowdy and disordered, the primes have no evident pattern. The more of them you list, the more erratic they ...

Naturally, I couldn't resist. I started with my cell phone number, which is the product of three small primes and an 8-digit prime (for obvious reasons, I won't say what they are). What about my ...