Cooperation generates that extra element—that additional part beyond the sum of the parts—that we might call “coöpower.” Coöpower derives from the strength of the values and principles at the heart of cooperation: participatory democracy, equity in the distribution of wealth, car … | Continue reading
Ceramides are all the rage in the skincare and beauty world. These waxy little molecules hold our skin cells together, helping our skin stay youthful and healthy by trapping moisture and repelling damaging toxins. However, ceramide’s anti-aging properties may only be skin deep. A … | Continue reading
Life on this planet has a lot going for it. The Earth is not too hot, nor is it too cold. We have just enough carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect. We have plentiful water, yet enough land for an array of lifeforms to make a home here. We have a … | Continue reading
LLMs have never experienced anything. They are just programs that have ingested unimaginable amounts of text. LLMs might do a great job at describing the sensation of being drunk, but this is only because they have read a lot of descriptions of being drunk. They have not, and can … | Continue reading
Over the past few months, the world has witnessed the dazzling capabilities of GPTs (“Generative Pretrained Transformers”), which seem to become more impressive by the day. One of their most revolutionary breakthroughs has been the ability to create images — artworks and “photogr … | Continue reading
The future, my mom used to say, belongs to those who wake up early. L’avenir appartient à ceux qui se lèvent tôt. She’d say this as we drove to early ice skating practices on those cold winter mornings growing up in Quebec. As it turns out, science may be proving her right — thou … | Continue reading
The use of competency frameworks is an absolute essential for high-performing organizations today. Organizations thrive when their employees thrive, and one factor that helps employees thrive is clarity of expectations. Learning leaders know that employees are more productive an … | Continue reading
When someone dies in the U.S., the vast majority of the time, their body is either embalmed, placed in a coffin, and buried in a cemetery, or cremated and the ashes returned to their loved ones in an urn — but those aren’t the only options. A growing number of funeral directors, … | Continue reading
Nine out of every ten humans are right-handed, an imbalance that researchers for decades have attempted to explain, without definitive success. One of the ideas considered is the fighting hypothesis, which suggests that left-handedness provides an advantage in combat, albeit with … | Continue reading
Take a look around you at everything on Earth. If you were to investigate what any object is made out of, you could subdivide it into progressively smaller and smaller chunks. All living creatures are made up of cells, which in turn are composed of a complex array of molecules, w … | Continue reading
Celebrated science communicator Carl Sagan had a way of speaking and writing that instilled listeners and readers with wonder and nurtured the human drive to explore. It was partially for this reason that the Cornell University scientist and narrator of the timeless PBS documenta … | Continue reading
In 2013, social psychologist Johnathan Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff started to notice a culture shift on university campuses across America. At these former havens of free speech and protest against restrictive university rules, students began looking for shelter from t … | Continue reading
If you ask a Dutch person to name a word that they feel encapsulates their culture, chances are they will answer “gezellig.” Ask them what gezellig means, though, and they’ll almost certainly take a bit longer to come up with what they feel is a satisfactory response. Like “nikse … | Continue reading
Halfway between Isntanbul and Ankara, in one of the most historic and beautiful parts of northwest Turkey, is a deep valley covered in dense pine forests and blessed with thermal springs. And in this valley is something that seems right out of a Disney movie: row upon row of iden … | Continue reading
Humans evolved to live in small groups — not just with blood-related kin, but with friends. Friends worked together to secure resources, seek justice, and protect each other. The more cooperative and supportive the group was, the more likely it was to survive and pass on its bon … | Continue reading
In his book A Brief History of AI, Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and an AI researcher, explains that AI is not about creating life, but rather about creating machines that can perform tasks requiring intelligence. Wooldridge disc … | Continue reading
People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their valuables. People … | Continue reading
Looking up at the Moon at night, you may have noticed that the same side always faces the Earth. Whenever you look at the Moon, you will see the same features, the same canyons and craters, no matter what the Moon’s phase is. The other side is hidden from our view. It always face … | Continue reading
Back in the 1990s, observations of type Ia supernovae were the key data set that led astronomers to conclude that the Universe’s expansion was accelerating, and some new form of energy, now known as dark energy, was permeating the Universe. Over the past ~25 years, those observat … | Continue reading
The fear of reanimated corpses terrorizing the living seems embedded in the global imagination. Indeed, ancient societies created burial rituals in order to prevent the dearly departed from becoming the unwelcome undead. While more recent burial rituals — from mock burials forci … | Continue reading
Think about the last time you saw a rainbow; what was it like? It was probably evidently a “bow,” for starters, where it made its classic arc-like shape, with colors changing from red on the outside through the full spectrum of colors, down to blue/violet on the interior. There m … | Continue reading
Without water, life on Earth could not exist as it does today. Understanding the history of water in the universe is critical to understanding how planets like Earth come to be. Astronomers typically refer to the journey water takes from its formation as individual molecules in … | Continue reading
As with any impassioned community, beer aficionados have had their share of debates, exchanges, and straight-up brawls over their beloved brews. There’s the ever-shifting continuum of what distinguishes a craft brewery from a micro- or nano-brewery. There are ongoing arguments on … | Continue reading
Mio Yokoi is floating down a river, laid out upon a raft, veiled and blanketed in flowers — covered in beauty, she describes it. Like something from The Lord of the Rings. She is dead. Yokoi sees that she is dead and covered on the raft, and on the river, nature is enveloping h … | Continue reading
Terrestrially, plate tectonics are a vital part of Earth’s evolution. This map of Earth shows, in black, the more than 300,000 earthquake epicenters identified from 1964-present. The earthquake locations clearly trace out a number of “lines” on the map, which correspond to a num … | Continue reading
Sixty thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia, bands of Neanderthals thrived in a valley in central Spain, doing everything they needed to survive generation after generation. But about 45 miles north of what is now the city of Madrid, researchers have discovered a site … | Continue reading
Fictional monsters have always reflected real-life societal fears and anxieties, but the rapidly changing world around us makes it difficult to say where the monster is — and in fact, the monster may be ourselves. This makes the traditional monster narratives of clear-cut heroes … | Continue reading
The visible Universe is full of temperature extremes. The galaxy Centaurus A is the closest example of an active galaxy to Earth, with its high-energy jets caused by electromagnetic acceleration around the central black hole. The extent of its jets are far smaller than the jets … | Continue reading
When stars are born, they can come with a wide variety of masses. But there are only a few ways that stars can die, and only a few types of remnants that can be left behind: white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Neutrons stars and black holes are most frequently created f … | Continue reading
Is the “15-minute city,” a concept in which all of life’s necessary amenities are no more than a brisk walk away, a vision of urban paradise or a thinly disguised open-air prison? Town planning experts tend toward the former, conspiracy theorists toward the latter. Customers lin … | Continue reading
Social learning, in which members of the same species learn new behaviors from each other, is thought to be relatively rare within the animal kingdom, mastered by only the biggest-brained social creatures. But as new research published in PLoS Biology shows, bumblebees might buck … | Continue reading
The famed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had an unusual way of looking at art, one that was inspired by his early work as a philologist studying ancient Greek language and literature. Rather than distinguishing between an artwork’s genre, medium, or time period, as most critics … | Continue reading
A new study looks at our comfort in being around other people as a byproduct of evolution. | Continue reading
Microsoft’s search engine Bing is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, and right now, it is all over the news. Witness the disturbing article by Kevin Roose, who describes for the New York Times his interactions with the search en … | Continue reading
For most of human history, the stars blazed in an otherwise dark night sky. But starting around the Industrial Revolution, as artificial light increasingly lit cities and towns at night, the stars began to disappear. We are two astronomers who depend on dark night skies to do ou … | Continue reading
For many years, the neutrino was among the most puzzling and elusive of cosmic particles. It took more than two decades from when it was first predicted to when it was finally detected, and they came along with a bunch of surprises that make them unique among all the particles th … | Continue reading
It can be daunting to stand at the dawn of a new cognitive age of human-machine teaming in warfare and imagine the future, and we should be humble in our ability to do so. The deep learning revolution is only a decade old, and the capabilities of AI systems and how they are used … | Continue reading
The possibility of precious objects hidden in secret chambers can really ignite the imagination. In the mid-1960s, British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield pondered whether one could detect hidden areas in Egyptian pyramids by capturing cosmic rays that passed through unseen voids. H … | Continue reading
In their attempt to understand how life might thrive on other planets, astrobiologists often travel to the most extreme and inhospitable places on Earth. And when it comes to simulating environmental conditions on icy moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, Antarctica … | Continue reading
Earthquakes are terrifying, even if they are usually brief. Within a few seconds they can wreak widespread destruction, causing great structural damage, shifting landmasses, and triggering tsunamis. Not all earthquakes are so short-lived, either. Earthquakes can last for minutes … | Continue reading
In this Universe, there are many things that we’re certain must exist, even though we haven’t discovered them just yet. These gaps in our understanding include the very first stars and galaxies: objects that didn’t exist in the early stages of the hot Big Bang, but that exist in … | Continue reading
By inserting an alligator gene into catfish, Alabama scientists radically increased their disease resistance — but more work is needed before the genetically modified fish could find their way into farms or onto your plate. The challenge: Catfish are the most popular species rai … | Continue reading
Humanity has two old, profound questions. The first question concerns the origin of all that exists, the cosmos itself. The second question asks how a lifeless world could spontaneously generate self-replicating organisms that go on to conquer the planet. These two questions of o … | Continue reading
Antarctica is the remotest part of the world, but it is a hub of scientific discovery, international diplomacy and environmental change. It was officially discovered over 200 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1820, when members of a Russian expedition sighted land in what is now known as th … | Continue reading
Habits shape our lives without us even noticing—from brushing our teeth in the morning to scrolling through our phones before falling asleep. “In the course of your day, about 40% of the things you do are habits,” says Dr. Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. … | Continue reading
Throughout much of recorded human history, China has boasted the largest population in the world – and until recently, by some margin. So news that the Chinese population is now in decline, and will sometime later this year be surpassed by that of India, is big news even if long … | Continue reading
Strokes commonly strike the old. The average age for the devastating condition — in which blood supply to a part of the brain is blocked or when a blood vessel in the brain bursts — is around 71.4 years in men and 76.9 years in women. Millennials, however, are starting to bring t … | Continue reading
A unique CRISPR system that destroys infected cells is unlike anything scientists have ever seen before — and it could revolutionize how we use the powerful gene editing technology in the future. CRISPR 101: While bacteria can infect humans, they can also be infected — a virus c … | Continue reading