Archive

A project to decipher the brain’s learning rules could revolutionize machine learning.

The famous Sleeping Beauty problem has divided probability theorists, decision theorists and philosophers for over 15 years. Puzzle columnist Pradeep Mutalik claims to have discovered the source of confusion.

The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24.

The Go-playing program teaches itself to replicate something very much like human intuition, an advance that promises far-reaching consequences.

Scientists have created a synthetic organism that possesses only the genes it needs to survive. But they have no idea what roughly a third of those genes do.

For four game show variations of the hat puzzle, four clever ways to earn a better payoff than you might expect.

New insights from neuroscience — aided by a small zoo’s worth of dancing animals — are revealing the biological origins of rhythm.

The biologist David Deamer proposes that life evolved from a collection of interacting molecules, probably in a pool in the shadow of a volcano.

A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a long-standing assumption about how they behave.