Category: Science

Memory has never been a recording. Psychologists have understood for decades that recollection is an act of reconstruction — the brain assembles a plausible version of the past each time we reach for it, patching gaps with expectation, suggestion and whatever story feels right. That flexibility is why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, and why…

For the past few years, mathematics has served as artificial intelligence’s proving ground. It was an obvious target: math is self-contained, its claims can be checked line by line, and a proof is either valid or it isn’t. That clarity made it the ideal arena for testing whether machines could do more than summarize text…

Light is arguably the most studied phenomenon in physics. It has been measured, bent, split, slowed, squeezed and twisted for more than three centuries, and the theory describing it u2014 quantum electrodynamics u2014 is among the most precisely tested frameworks science has ever produced. So when a team of physicists announces an “astonishing” property of…

Teeth are among the most durable things the human body leaves behind, and they are also among the most talkative. Long after bones have weathered and burial shrouds have rotted, enamel preserves a chemical diary of the years in which it formed. Researchers studying a medieval community have now used that diary to answer a…

AI’s Mathematics Blitz Pushes Science Into Strange New Territory Mathematics has long been considered the last redoubt of human intuition — a discipline where creativity, taste and stubbornness matter more than raw computation. That assumption is now under sustained pressure. Artificial-intelligence systems have moved from solving competition-style problems to engaging with genuine research mathematics, and…

Scientists Report Discovery That Could Help Explain Why Life Exists Few questions in science are as large, or as stubborn, as the one researchers are once again circling: why is there anything here at all, and why did some of that anything become alive? A new finding reported this week is being described as a…

Every October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute hand out the world’s most famous awards for discovery. And every October, a familiar ritual follows: scientists celebrate, journalists scramble to explain the work in plain language, and the public is left to marvel at how strange the frontier…

Every Martian morning, in a particular season, a ribbon of water-ice cloud unfurls across the planet’s southern hemisphere. It stretches roughly 1,000 miles — long enough to span a continent on Earth — streaming westward from the flank of an enormous extinct volcano. And then, within hours, it’s gone. The same thing happens the next…

Scientists who believe technology will ultimately solve the climate crisis are less likely to take action on climate change themselves, according to research reported this week. The finding, highlighted by the Guardian, points to a psychological pattern that researchers have long suspected but rarely tested within the scientific community itself: the more confident a person…

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded for research into the workings of the brain, the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute announced this week, honouring a field that has transformed our understanding of how thought, memory and behaviour arise from biological tissue. The decision places neuroscience back at the centre…