Facts So Romantic

One of the weirdest things about our human experience of the world is how remarkably narrow it can be. We’re equipped with some extraordinary senses for sure. Our visual system can discriminate…

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…

A productive hunt is a violent act—success requiring as it does the dismemberment of a living creature. Yet, to focus alone on the concluding moment, the bloody brutality of the killing…

It’s a feeling we all know well—you’re at a work meeting or in the middle of a book, when you realize that you have no idea what just happened. Without noticing it, your thoughts…

The power of platforms like Facebook and Google has escaped the control of the optimistic technocrats at their helm. And it is wreaking havoc in ways that we lab rats have only just begun…

COVID has reached peak unsexiness. The thought occurs to me as I scroll through previously lively physician COVID forums where research, clinical quandaries, and professional anxieties…

In his new book, The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, Edward Melillo calls some insects “little laboratories,” the various productions of which have supported…

The first artificial neural networks weren’t abstractions inside a computer, but actual physical systems made of whirring motors and big bundles of wire. Here I’ll describe how you…

I’m one of the lucky ones. The onset of this pandemic has put a strain on the sanity of many people forced to isolate themselves from friends and family. If you live alone, or with roommates…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The 61st International Mathematical Olympiad, or IMO, began yesterday. It may go down in history for at least two reasons:…