Features

The problem of common-sense reasoning has plagued the field of artificial intelligence for over 50 years. Now a new approach, borrowing from two disparate lines of thinking, has made important progress.

The laws of physics imply that the passage of time is an illusion. To avoid this conclusion, we might have to rethink the reality of infinitely precise numbers.

When 50 mathematicians spend a week in the woods, there’s no telling what will happen. And that’s the point.

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.