Abstractions blog

Computational neuroscientists taught an artificial neural network to imitate a biological neuron. The result offers a new way to think about the complexity of single brain cells.

Genomes hold immense quantities of noncoding DNA. Some of it is essential for life, some seems useless, and some has its own agenda.

New work shows that neurons and other brain cells use DNA double-strand breaks, often associated with cancer, neurodegeneration and aging, to quickly express genes related to learning and memory.

One of the strangest results in mathematics explains how it’s possible to turn one sphere into two identical copies, simply by rearranging its pieces.

The most widely used technique for finding the largest or smallest values of a math function turns out to be a fundamentally difficult computational problem.

The unambiguous discovery of a Wigner crystal relied on a novel technique for probing the insides of complex materials.

The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the patterned growth of a bismuth crystal, extending Alan Turing’s 1952 idea to the atomic scale.

Brown dwarfs such as “The Accident” are illuminating the murky borderlands that separate planets from stars.

By focusing on relationships between solutions to polynomial equations, rather than the exact solutions themselves, Évariste Galois changed the course of modern mathematics.