At a moment when vaccines promise to end the coronavirus pandemic, emerging new variants threaten to accelerate it. The astonishingly fast development of safe and effective vaccines…

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…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Computer scientists are trying to build an AI system that can win a gold medal at the world’s premier math competition.Photograph…

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” These are the opening words of the short book On Bullshit, written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.…

Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology.For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous…

In January, Robert Williams, an African-American man, was wrongfully arrested due to an inaccurate facial recognition algorithm, a computerized approach that analyzes human faces and…

 We need a global debate on the best way to respond to these demographic changes.Photo illustration by Arthimedes / ShutterstockIn their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists…

The COVID-19 pandemic was some epidemiologist’s nightmare when Adam Kucharski was writing Rules of Contagion. Released this week, the book, which includes brief mentions of the encroaching…

By using this methodology, combined with available information from Google maps to measure store size and popularity, one can model the best time to go shopping in a pandemic.Photograph…

The modern quest for Promethean fire is underway in an anonymous office park in Foothill Ranch, California, an hour southeast of Los Angeles. In the park, along a meandering drive,…