Facts So Romantic

It’s hard to make sense of witch hunts. Many people of early modern Europe and colonial America seemed to have genuinely believed that witches posed a serious threat. But if witch trials—like…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.It’s very easy to break things in biology,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California,…

Artificial Intelligence, it seems, is now everywhere. Text translation, speech recognition, book recommendations, even your spam filter is now “artificially intelligent.” But just what…

Language,” the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, “is a virus from outer space.” Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.A gold wedding band will melt at around 1,000 degrees Celsius and vaporize at about 2,800 degrees, but these changes…

The Canadian poet Dennis Lee once wrote that the consolations of existence might be improved if we thought, worked, and lived as though we were inhabiting “the early days of a better…

Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, passed away recently. To celebrate his iconic role, we are revisiting this piece on the Voight-Kampff test,…

The mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for more than a millennium on the island of Malta—and then collapsed within two generations—have been unravelled by archaeologists…

In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, “This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy,”…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Starlings take to the sky in swirling vortices; ants teem like rivers. “They stretch, they move around, but they…