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Mice exposed to stress had pups that were anxious from birth. Biologist Aleksey Shatskikh explains how small RNAs in sperm can carry that signal to the embryo.
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A psychologist explains the morphological box: split a messy problem into parts, lay them on a grid, and see options you would not have thought of.
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An astrophysicist compares a gamma-ray burst to a laser pointer aimed at Earth: ozone stripped, mutations, and a chance of about once in 100 million years.
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The original definition of AGI can't be tested, so companies wrote their own. In one version, AGI is whatever earns a billion dollars. Here is why that matters.
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A psychologist explains why memory is a byproduct of thinking, and why handing an essay to AI means you remember almost nothing of it.
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Silicon is more common than carbon in Earth's crust, yet life never used it. An astronomer explains why silicon locks into stone and carbon stays flexible.
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A smartphone can hold every grandmaster chess game ever played. A psychologist argues that human limits, not limitless knowledge, are where creativity begins.
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AI may use up all public human text by 2032. Sergey Markov offers a half-joke: maybe our world is a generator of synthetic training data for some model.
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Early farmers walked past lands with regular rain and settled where it never came. A historian on why Sumer's dry south may have pushed people to invent.
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Send Little Red Riding Hood from Bordeaux toward Russia and her basket changes at every border. A folklorist explains where a fairy tale keeps its nationality.
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Women have two X chromosomes and men one, so female cells wrap one X in a coat of non-coding RNA and switch it off. A biologist explains why it matters.
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Besides electrical spikes, brain cells can wrap non-coding RNA in membrane bubbles and send it to neighbours, changing how their genes work. A biologist explains.
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Vikings didn't burn their gods when they turned Christian. They demoted them to heroes of the past and carved Sigurd the dragon-slayer onto church walls.
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Why does the stepmother torment the heroine? A folklorist's quick answer: she came from far away, and her own daughter had to marry too.
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A Nature paper priced one Arctic methane scenario at $65 trillion. Igor Semiletov explains why the shallow Siberian shelf is where it could start.
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