Archive

Biology

Every navigator needs a compass and a map. A young bird is born with its heading, but its map comes from experience.

Psychology

Repeat an action in the same place often enough, and the place starts doing it for you.

Mathematics & Logic

A cipher hides a message's letters but not its patterns, and the patterns are what give it away.

Mathematics & Logic

Attention, next-word prediction and scale — and the gap between sounding right and being right.

Mathematics & Logic

Nobody writes the rules. A network of simple calculations tunes itself on examples until its answers come out right.

Mathematics & Logic

Seventy years of AI research, one uncomfortable pattern: methods that scale with computing beat methods built on what we know.

Society

Why a light bulb, a printing press and a television screen change people, whatever they carry.

Physics

Lamps in a dark room, a tube on a ruler and a book of doubts — how one scholar rebuilt the science of sight.

Psychology

We think of a test as a way to measure learning. Done well, it is one of the best ways to cause it.

Psychology

Memory fades along a curve. Coming back at the right moments bends it.

Biology

The smallest thing that counts as alive — and the tiny machinery packed inside it.