How consciousness emerges in the brain is the ultimate mystery. Scientists generally agree that consciousness relies on multiple brain regions working in tandem. But the areas and neural connections ...

Our bodies are constantly breaking down. Over time, their built-in repair mechanisms also fail. Knee cartilage grinds away. Hip joints no longer support weight. Treatments for breast cancer and other ...

I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite. And then there ...

Let a mouse nose around a house, and it will rapidly find food and form a strategy to return to it without getting caught. Given the same task, an AI would require millions of training examples and ...

If you’re not familiar with the concept of “world models” just yet, a storm of activity at the start of 2025 gives every indication it may soon become a well-known term. What large language models are ...

A couple months ago, friends and business contacts started asking me for a crash course on my professional research studying virtual environments. Their interest reflects an explosion—which you’ve ...

DNA is nature’s computing device. Unlike data centers, DNA is incredibly compact. These molecules package an entire organism’s genetic blueprint into tiny but sophisticated structures inside each cell ...

With their bright blue bases, yellow gears, and exposed circuit tops, the 3D-printed robots look like a child’s toys. Yet as a roughly two-dozen-member collective, they can flow around obstacles ...

Scientists just unveiled the world’s tiniest pacemaker. Smaller than a grain of rice and controlled by light shone through the skin, the pacemaker generates power and squeezes the heart’s muscles ...

The project explores how life adapts to extreme environments—and hopes to inspire new drugs or even treatments to aid space travel. We’ve only scratched the surface of what thrives in the deepest ...

Can we reprogram existing life at will? To synthetic biologists, the answer is yes. The central code for biology is simple. DNA letters, in groups of three, are translated into amino acids—Lego blocks ...

We don’t think twice about using our hands throughout the day for tasks that still thwart sophisticated robots—pouring coffee without spilling when half-awake, folding laundry without ripping delicate ...