Facts So Romantic

When I read that more than a billion animals had lost their lives to bushfires still raging in Australia, I froze, staring at the incomprehensible figure on my screen. A sort of sinking…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank,…

There’s a name for the sudden spur of motivation we often feel at New Year’s—the fresh start effect. You might also feel it on your birthday, at the start of the school year, or during…

Someday, humanity might build conscious machines—machines that not only seem to think and feel, but really do. But how could we know for sure? How could we tell whether those machines…

The study of memory has always been one of the stranger outposts of science. In the 1950s, an unknown psychology professor at the University of Michigan named James McConnell made headlines—and…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Compared to the unsolved mysteries of the universe, far less gets said about one of the most profound facts to have…

What is a species? It’s a question that has agonized scientists since well before Darwin. With some exceptions, the thinking has landed on an evidently firm reproductive barrier: Members…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated…

Talk of “Mother Trees,” from a scientist studying plant life, can sound fanciful, like something out of a fairy tale. Suzanne Simard is here to tell you that it’s not. For the past…

In 2002, David M. Morens, now Senior Scientific Advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, wrote an essay called “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” It featured…