Claire Voisin on mathematical creativity.
Vladimir Nabokov: Symbols and Signs. One of the best short stories ever written.
The ‘Mother Tree’ idea is everywhere, but how much of it is real?
A conversation about art by Virginia Woolf. Originally published 1 September 1934. Unearthed from the archives of The Yale Review.
Cal Newport on how he learned to concentrate.
How the Big Bang got its name.
Climate change has slowed Earth’s rotation and could affect how we keep time. The effect of melting polar ice could delay the need for a ‘leap second’ by three years.
‘Entropy Bagels’ and other complex structures emerge from simple rules.
Amazing 1.3 gigapixel image of the Vela supernova remnant made with the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Zooming in.
To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle.
How chain-of-thought reasoning helps neural networks compute.
Michel Talagrand has been awarded the Abel Prize.
Inside the miracle of modern chip manufacturing.
Inside China’s giant underground neutrino lab.
Are your earliest childhood memories still lurking in your mind or gone forever?
The magisterial remastering of the Grand Palais. I look forward to the grand reopening.
This super-Earth is the first planet confirmed to have a permanent dark side.
Review of Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg.
What makes an album the greatest of all time?
Is ChatGPT making scientists hyper-productive? The highs and lows of using AI. Large language models are transforming scientific writing and publishing. But the productivity boost that these tools bring could come with a downside.
Jaron Lanier on how to picture A.I..
After a year of trawling through scientific reports and national regulatory databases, scientists funded by the Norwegian Research Council have compiled a list of more than 16,000 ‘plastic chemicals’ — compounds found in plastics or thought to be used in them, including raw ingredients and additives such as stabilizers and colourants. Of these, at least 4,200 are “persistent, bioaccumulative, mobile and/or toxic”, the group found.