Geometrically frustrated rose petals.
AI is nothing like a brain, and that’s OK.
How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models.
Why do hailstones get so big?
The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect.
Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.
At home with William Kentridge.
Answers to a 160-year-old riddle about the genetics of Mendel’s pea traits.
How to be a great thinker. Read more books. Be multidisciplinary. Assume you might be wrong. Keep learning.
How much energy does it take to think?
Lotions and perfume can weaken a ‘human oxidation field’ made by your skin. Personal care products may chemically alter the air around us. Whether that’s good or bad remains unclear.
Early barred galaxy raises questions about cosmic evolution.
Michiko Kakutani on why Silicon Valley’s most powerful people are so obsessed with hobbits.
The observation of bonding behaviors in wild chimpanzees suggests that some aspects of human attachments have a deep evolutionary origin.
Some (good) remarks on AI by Neal Stephenson.
Chris Ware reviews Olivier Schrauwen’s graphic novel Sunday.
Shrunken heads, long charged with ritual meaning, finally get scientific attention.
New drone technology is transforming the battlefield in Ukraine - and demonstrating the obsolescence of much Western weaponry. Exactly.
Jed Perl on a century of surrealism.
Google DeepMind has used chatbot models to come up with solutions to major problems in mathematics and computer science.
Thousands buried in 17th century Italian crypt reveal lives of working poor.
A prediction of the gravitational waves produced by interacting black holes achieves high precision and demonstrates the link between general relativity and geometry.
Fairy Pools by Patricia Lockwood. Excerpt from her forthcoming novel Will There Ever Be Another You.