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Credit and job decisions now come from algorithms with the weight of a court ruling. Sergey Markov on why you can't see the evidence or appeal.
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A buyer in Ur sent Ea-Nasir a clay tablet demanding his money back for bad copper. An archaeologist's guess: it was a skirmish in a Bronze Age trade war.
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Fungi that grew in Chernobyl may feed on radiation. A mycologist explains why the same trait makes them a threat on a space station and an ally on Mars.
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A supernova hides the core of a dying star for up to 100 days. A rare gamma-ray burst pierces the shell and shows the black hole forming in seconds.
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Astrophysicist Vladimir Lipunov on the kilonova of 2017: two neutron stars merged, and the debris carried the gold and platinum we wear.
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A man who forgot his nurse within minutes could still learn a hard new skill. Neurobiologist Olga Ivashkina on why skills and life events live in separate networks.
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Dwarfs with pickaxes, forges and plenty of meat may be a memory of real Bronze Age miners, who dug kilometres of tunnels and paid for their dinner in metal.
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A brain scientist argues that we exist only at the level of consciousness. In dreamless sleep, a faint or under anesthesia, he says, you are simply not there.
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Neurobiologist Olga Ivashkina on why one breakfast in Japan stays sharp while a month of ordinary mornings melts into a single "typical breakfast".
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Early iron was softer than bronze and rusted. It won the Bronze Age collapse anyway: one bronze swordsman cost as much as ten with iron swords.
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A million memristors draw microwatts, and a million synapses is about a spinal cord's worth. Max Talanov on why that could make implants for paralysed patients possible.
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Organic matter on Mars sounds like a life story. An astronomer explains why "organic" only means carbon, and why the split from "inorganic" is a historical leftover.
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Four thousand years ago a Mesopotamian temple stored the city's grain and lent it out at interest. When debts piled up, the city could not raise an army.
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A language model sees only words, yet to guess the next one it may have to rebuild the world behind them. An AI researcher on why that dumb task asks so much.
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Terence McKenna said mushrooms made early humans gentle. A mycologist says psilocybin only amplifies what you already believe, and that may be how religion began.
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