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A science fiction novelist and an internet commenter made breakthroughs on a longstanding problem about the number of ways you can arrange a set of items. What did they discover?

Subatomic particles called muons are thought to have streamed through the atmosphere and irradiated megafauna like the monster shark megalodon.

Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.

Neural networks are famously incomprehensible, so Been Kim is developing a “translator for humans.”

Astronomers couldn’t find enough satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Now they have the opposite problem.

Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary leap in complexity.

Dark matter may occasionally interact with minerals in the earth, leaving telltale tracks that physicists hope to decipher.

The same codes needed to thwart errors in quantum computers may also give the fabric of space-time its intrinsic robustness.

A primordial developmental toolkit shared by all vertebrates, and described by a theory of the mathematician Alan Turing, sets the growth pattern for all types of skin structures.