Archive

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.

The story of the universe’s birth — and evidence for string theory — could be found in triangles and myriad other shapes in the sky.

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

A project to decipher the brain’s learning rules could revolutionize machine learning.

The famous Sleeping Beauty problem has divided probability theorists, decision theorists and philosophers for over 15 years. Puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalik claims to have discovered the source of confusion.

The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24.

The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

Scientists have created a synthetic organism that possesses only the genes it needs to survive. But they have no idea what roughly a third of those genes do.

For four game show variations of the hat puzzle, four clever ways to earn a better payoff than you might expect.