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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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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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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Drilling for oil under the sea, people sequenced the mud and met fungi, bacteria and viruses. One oceanologist says they may outweigh the rest of life on Earth.
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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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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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Off the Siberian coast, patches of sea over a kilometre wide bubble with methane, and the biggest are growing. Why the climate's methane count may be too low.
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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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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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