Memory doesn’t represent a single scientific mystery; it’s many of them. Neuroscientists and psychologists have come to recognize varied types of memory that coexist in our brain: episodic memories of past experiences, semantic memories of […]
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Last October, as the James Webb Space Telescope beamed down its first long exposures of the sky near the constellation Eridanus, astronomers began to piece together the story of a dim, flickering point of light […]
One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I […]
In the world of quantum error correction, an underdog is coming for the king. Last week, new simulations from two groups reported that a rising class of quantum error-correcting codes is more efficient by an […]
Science routinely puts forward theories, then batters them with data till only one is left standing. In the fledgling science of consciousness, a dominant theory has yet to emerge. More than 20 are still taken […]
It’s one of the biggest cliches in crime and science fiction: An investigator pulls up a blurry photo on a computer screen and asks for it to be enhanced, and boom, the image comes into […]
In early June, buzz built as mathematicians landed at London’s Heathrow Airport. Their destination was the University of Oxford and a conference in honor of the 65th birthday of Michael Hopkins, a mathematician at Harvard […]
Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant — a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the […]
In the first week of the fall semester in 2007, Marco Carmosino dragged himself to a math class required for all computer science majors at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Carmosino, a sophomore, was considering […]
The modern notion of a black hole has been with us since February 1916, three months after Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of gravity. That’s when the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, in the midst of fighting […]
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