By Michael Zargham & Ilan Ben-Meir “Language is the liquid that we’re all dissolved in.Great for solving problems, after it creates a problem.” — Isaac Brock By now, everybody has heard some version o
During the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this month, a great deal of the programming during the STM Conference and much of the programming around the fair was focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and
The past year has seen remarkable development in the AI-enabled services embedded in information tools across the scholarly communications industry. Looking at library-licensed content and tools, AI i
fundamental physics Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time September 25, 2024 A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of
In 1940, the French mathematician and artillery officer Jean Leray was taken prisoner by the Germans. He told his captors that he was a topologist, fearful that if they discovered his true area of exp
The universe might be infinitely large. As Jacob Barandes and I have argued (Ch 7 of The Weirdness of the World; free draft version here), infinitude seems the most straightforward extension of curren
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism
complex systems The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges June 10, 2024 The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework h
The ability to remain anonymous when commenting online is a double-edged sword. It is valuable because it enables people to speak without fear of social and legal discrimination. But this is also what
The planarian is nobody's idea of a genius. A flatworm shaped like a comma, it can be found wriggling through the muck of lakes and ponds worldwide. Its pin-size head has a microscopic structure that
Image: The Verge In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. T
Once an IoT device is shipped, its manufacturer typically has very little information about what is going on with it in the field. This creates a black hole. A huge one, if you consider that there are
Q&A A Biochemist’s View of Life’s Origin Reframes Cancer and Aging August 8, 2022 The biochemist Nick Lane thinks life first evolved in hydrothermal vents where precursors of metabolism appeared befor
astrophysics Black Hole Image Reveals the Beast Inside the Milky Way’s Heart May 12, 2022 In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released a historic image of a supermassive black hole in another galaxy.
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