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Some neurons fire for one cartoon and ignore all others. A neurobiologist explains how the brain builds a Simpsons cell from contrast and colour, and what we still can't explain.
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France and Armenia put chess into schools to build general ability. Players multiplied, but measured abilities didn't move. A psychologist on why thinking doesn't transfer.
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Saturn's moon Enceladus sits at −180 °C, yet it throws out grains formed in 90 °C water. An astrophysicist explains why it ranks second only to Earth for life.
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Over 40,000 years ago, people at Kostenki drilled and painted fossils from the age of dinosaurs. The wear marks show they sewed them onto their clothes.
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Chatbots get tangled in long chats because attention stretches thin. A working-memory token lets a transformer read in small chunks and carry the thread to 50 million tokens.
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Your hunger is old, but your route to the canteen is new. Konstantin Anokhin on how the brain grows a personal tree of systems, one failed plan at a time.
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Webb and Hubble have fields of view 10,000 times smaller than a wide-field robotic telescope. Vladimir Lipunov on why explosions get caught by networks.
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A hungry rabbit, two pedals and a cell that fires for "any pedal". Konstantin Anokhin on how neurons build red, chairs and people that physics doesn't contain.
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Archaeologist Vasily Novikov on Viking women: they could divorce easily, ran households, did magic, and a man who wanted magic had to dress like one.
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The first thing humans ever wrote down was a number. Olga Popova explains how pebbles in clay balls, and a flock of sheep, led to the first writing.
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Why can't we recall being a baby? A neurobiologist explains infantile amnesia, silent engrams, and why your earliest memory may be partly rebuilt from family stories.
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The biggest wave ever recorded was 524 metres high and began as a landslide in a narrow Alaskan bay. Oceanologist Mikhail Nosov on Lituya Bay.
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When the sea pulls back from the shore, the seabed near the coast has just sunk. An oceanologist explains why the water falls first and the big wave follows.
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A 2022 volcanic blast sent an air wave across the Pacific at tsunami speed. It pushed the ocean as it went, and the seabed felt more pressure than the sky.
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An archaeologist's passing guess: Arthur's sword in the stone may echo Bronze Age chiefs lifting freshly cast swords out of stone moulds.
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