Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.

Philipp Ammon for Quanta Magazine
Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.
A newfound hub of immune system activity at the back of the brain solves a century-old puzzle.
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays twist and turn on their way to Earth, which has made it nearly impossible to identify the colossal monsters that create them.
Researchers have proved a special case of the Erdős-Hajnal conjecture, which shows what happens in graphs that exclude anything resembling a pentagon.
The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — one that physicists use to probe the physics of information.
Two new approaches allow deep neural networks to solve entire families of partial differential equations, making it easier to model complicated systems and to do so orders of magnitude faster.
Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.
About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.
Anesthesia is very different from sleep — which is why it offers unique opportunities for studying the human brain, says the physician-researcher and statistician Emery Brown.
Playing with arithmetic can lead us to unexpected and profound discoveries that point toward deeper mathematics and sometimes even deeper science.
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