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Among its many peculiarities, the human brain has a habit of not responding in the same way to identical inputs. This may be due to the fact that our eyes and ears are noisy instruments, or because signals move in a stochastic fashion from neuron to neuron. It may also simply be a matter of […]

Physicist Paul Steinhardt remembers a great mentor and scientist.

Bertrand Russell’s quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias—the Dunning–Kruger effect—that has been so resonant that it has penetrated popular culture.Wikicommons On this past International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I reread a bit of Bertrand Russell. In 1933, dismayed at the Nazification of Germany, the philosopher wrote “The Triumph of Stupidity,” attributing the rise […]

How reconciling opposites is driving the science of black holes forward.

Ultimately, what matters most is that we provide our children with a sense of agency and autonomy by teaching them that tools don’t use us, we use them.Photograph by Iakov Filimonov / Shutterstock It looks like grownups can disregard the fear-mongering about the ill effects of digital media on kids. A 2017 study in Child […]

Oscar Wilde, the famed Irish essayist and playwright, had a gift, among other things, for counterintuitive aphorisms. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” an 1891 article, he wrote, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.” So perhaps Wilde wouldn’t have been surprised to hear of a series of recent scandals in the U.K.: The all-male […]

The idea that some species are relics that have stopped evolving is finally going extinct.

A new genetic technology that can quickly change entire populations gets broader.

Quantum mechanics rescued our understanding of past and future from the black hole.

Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy.