IntroductionThe cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last...

IntroductionIn algorithms, as in life, negativity can be a drag. Consider the problem of finding the shortest path between two points on a graph —...

IntroductionA mother gives her baby her all: love, hugs, kisses … and a sturdy army of bacteria. These simple cells, which journey from mother to...

IntroductionTheir ambitions were always high. When Will Sawin and Melanie Matchett Wood first started working together in the summer of 2020, they set out...

IntroductionIn a sunny lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two starfish fought over their prey. Overlapping arms pinned a hunk of thawing cocktail...

IntroductionAnimals that produce many offspring tend to have short lives, while less prolific species tend to live longer. Cockroaches lay hundreds of eggs while...

IntroductionIn what specific cases do quantum computers surpass their classical counterparts? That’s a hard question to answer, in part because today’s quantum computers are...

IntroductionAsk DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, to paint a picture of “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach,” and it will...

IntroductionIn mid-October, Justin Gilmer flew from California to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. While on the East Coast he visited his former...

Every Saturday we post a selection of articles from the week. These stories might include an eye-catching bit of news or a deep dive...

Ever since deep learning burst into the mainstream in 2012, the hype around AI research has often outpaced its reality. Over the past year...

To see what the future might look like it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this...