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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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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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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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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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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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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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In the Mesopotamian flood story of Atrahasis, the gods did not punish sin. Humans multiplied, got too loud, and the gods drowned them for some quiet.
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A model that can take a million tokens may use only 5–10% of them well. Mikhail Burtsev on why attention blurs, and why a fresh chat often beats a long one.
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Max Talanov, a neural network researcher, wants a brain-to-brain link that passes on neuromodulator levels, so we could finally feel what another person feels.
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Mesopotamians dug canals and invented writing, yet credited the gods. Historian Olga Popova on a mindset with no inventors and almost no named authors.
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A meter of sea level rise in a century is a building project for rich coasts and an eviction notice for small poor islands, says oceanologist Alexander Osadchiev.
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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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