Michael Segal
Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion
Getting human feeling to match the math is an ultimate goal in physics.
Why the Brain Is So Noisy
The surprising importance of spontaneous order and noise to how we think.
Are There Bacteria in Your Brain?
A surprising new result catches the attention of the neuroscience community.
We Need an FDA For Algorithms
UK mathematician Hannah Fry on the promise and danger of an AI world.
Have Balloons and Ice Broken the Standard Model?
How five anomalous events at two neutrino experiments provide evidence for supersymmetry.
The Online Magazine You Can’t Read Online
A software engineer tackles the distractions of online reading.
Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble?
John Carreyrou talks to Nautilus about the lessons of a $1 billion fraud.
Searches
Searching has a cost. It takes time and energy, and distracts us from other opportunities. It is also a quickly growing part of modern life. The world’s most-visited website is Google, suggesting that we devote more of our time to searching for content than consuming it. Exponentially growing databases create search overhead costs that grow […]
Connections
One hundred trillion. It’s about the size of the global money supply (called “broad money”), the bacterial count of the human microbiome, and the number of transistors in a supercomputer. It’s also approximately the number of neuronal connections in the human brain. Connection has an exponential, multiplicative power to create complexity. It’s where the meat […]
Self
In thinking about this month’s issue, the question came up among staff: What interesting stories are out there that involve the self but do not involve people? We thought of many, everything from quantum particle self-energies to immune system foreign-body detection. As varied as they were, these stories shared something in common: A fraught definition […]