Features

We give our genes and our environment all the credit for making us who we are. But random noise during development might be just as important.

Computer scientists established a new boundary on computationally verifiable knowledge. In doing so, they solved major open problems in quantum mechanics and pure mathematics.

A proposal for building wormhole-connected black holes offers a way to probe the paradoxes of quantum information.

By teaching machines to understand our true desires, one scientist hopes to avoid the potentially disastrous consequences of having them do what we command.

Summer sea ice could vanish later this decade, with disastrous consequences. It all depends on the physics of ice.

Machine learning and deep neural networks can capture and analyze the “language” of animal behavior in ways that go beyond what’s humanly possible.

Activity in the visual cortex and other sensory areas is dominated by signals about body movements, down to little tics and twitches. Scientists are now rethinking how they study and conceive of perception.

By ignoring their goals, evolutionary algorithms have solved longstanding challenges in artificial intelligence.

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original secret.