Facts So Romantic

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.One sunny day in the summer of 2019, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took…

Nina Strohminger, perhaps not unlike many fans of raunchy comedies and horror flicks, is drawn to disgust. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist has written extensively on the feeling…

David Bowie and Beyoncé never shared a stage, but they share the distinction of having cleverly eponymous species names in their honor. Bowie, the British glam-rock and pop sensation,…

Not too long ago, I briefly met Elizabeth Warren in a restaurant in Cambridge, near Harvard, where I’m now a postdoc in psychology. My dad and I saw the Massachusetts senator, a 2020…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.In early 2003, Chuck Bennett learned the precise contents of the cosmos.By then, most cosmologists had concluded that…

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share.…

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…