The Big Bang may not mark the absolute beginning of everything. A controversial cosmological model instead treats it as a boundary, with our universe on one side and a time-reversed anti-universe on ...

People with symmetry OCD feel intense distress when things don’t feel “just right” or aren’t symmetrical, even if there’s no clear logic behind it. Symmetry OCD isn’t a personal choice or trait.

Is the universe symmetric? It’s a really useful question to have the answer to when doing calculations, because symmetries tend to make the math much easier. Most of the physics discovered over the ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Symmetry also has an aesthetic meaning, although this is ...

In the very first microseconds of the Big Bang, something strange happened. Matter somehow outnumbered antimatter and kept the fledgling universe from annihilating itself. This break with conventional ...

Mirroring the mechanisms that make human faces and bodies—and those of many multicellular organisms—symmetrical, bee colonies build symmetrical nests when they are placed on either side of a ...

Almost all animals have symmetrical bodies. Bilateral symmetry is almost universal in all animals and is only very rarely broken—with exceptions like the five-armed starfish or crab species that have ...