You are looking for
Advanced search
Brains Cling to Old Habits When Learning New Tricks
...recently discovered surprising constraints on our learning abilities. The brain may be highly flexible and adaptive overall, but at least over short time frames, it learns by inefficiently recycling tricks...
Quantum Correlations Reverse Thermodynamic Arrow of Time
A recent experiment shows how quantum mechanics can make heat flow from a cold body to a hot one, an apparent (though not real) violation of the second law of...
Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks
...the role of TNTs is that it’s tricky to inhibit any one of these communication channels without interfering with the others. Much recent effort also focuses on finding biomarkers for...
Chronological Clues to Life’s Early History Lurk in Gene Transfers
...gene donor must be older than the descendants of the recipient. By pinpointing many such transfers, then, scientists can sort out the relative order of speciation involved. In their recent...
Three Decades Later, Mystery Numbers Explained
...values appear in many areas of mathematics, including, most famously, the Riemann hypothesis, which relates to the distribution of prime numbers. As I explained in my recent feature story on...
To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect
...already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently. In...
A Classical Math Problem Gets Pulled Into the Modern World
A century ago, the great mathematician David Hilbert posed a probing question in pure mathematics. A recent advance in optimization theory is bringing Hilbert’s work into a world of self-driving...
Questioning Truth, Reality and the Role of Science
...the recent recipient of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, an award given annually by the U.K.’s Royal Society. Massimi’s prize speech, delivered earlier this week, defended both science and the philosophy of...
The Slippery Math of Causation
...the world of genetics, the complex multifactorial nature of causality was highlighted in a recent Quanta article by Veronique Greenwood that described the intertwined effects of genes. One well-known approach...