Last July, two mathematicians from Durham University, Will Hide and Michael Magee, confirmed the existence of a much sought-after sequence of surfaces: each more complicated than the last, ultimately becoming so intricately connected with themselves […]
Not long ago, I was asked to explain the so-called Langlands program in a single tweet. Impossible, I immediately thought. It’s one of the biggest, most sweeping projects in mathematics, capable of connecting distant realms […]
How did life begin on Earth? It’s one of the greatest and most ancient mysteries in all of science — and the clues to solving it are all around us. Biologists have sometimes imagined evolutionary […]
Inside a soundproofed crate sits one of the world’s worst neural networks. After being presented with an image of the number 6, it pauses for a moment before identifying the digit: zero. Peter McMahon, the […]
In our most recent Insights puzzle, I challenged readers to figure out how certain magic tricks work. The tricks in question were of the sort where the magician somehow divines the identity of your hidden […]
In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone […]
If you’ve interacted with another human being this year, you’ve probably heard of Wordle, the addictive word-guessing game the coder Josh Wardle created for his partner and then sold to The New York Times for […]
The idea that life’s deepest, oldest roots were laid down by RNA molecules that evolved ever more complexity has dominated the origins-of-life field for the past few decades, reigning over competing theories that started instead […]
If a million computer scientists had dinner together, they’d rack up an enormous bill. And if one of them was feeling particularly thrifty and wanted to check if the bill was correct, the process would […]
The human body contains more than 200 types of cells by most estimates, all descended from a single fertilized egg. The spindly cells of the skin, the gangly branching neurons, the plump fat cells, the […]
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