On January 26, 1972, a Yugoslavian passenger plane flying 33,000 feet above then-Czechoslovakia exploded, ripped apart, and plummeted into the ground, killing 27 of the 28 passengers and crew. Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant, was the only one to survive the crash. Vulovic holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a […]
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our…
On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s…
Structuresstructure (noun): the arrangement of or relation between the parts of something complex; the organization of interrelated…
Most American newborns will arrive home from the hospital and start hitting their developmental milestones, to their parents’ delight.…
Setting: Chesterfield High, an unusual school in the suburbs of Ohio.The teacher writes on the board:2, 3, 5, 7, ...How, he asks,…
Our General Resonance Theory of consciousness, a framework with a panpsychist foundation, may, at least in theory, provide more complete…
In the late afternoon of May 5, SpaceX’s Elon Musk tweeted, “Starship landing nominal!” Musk is not known for understatement.…
Julian Barbour’s obsession with time began on Oct. 18, 1963. The 26-year-old Cambridge graduate in mathematics was on a train to…
Under a coral ledge, a day octopus and a brown-marbled grouper meet. The grouper was there first, as if waiting, and they emerge together;…
Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the…
Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the…
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Maps” issue in…
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Outbreak” issue…
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.New research finds that the subjective experience of time is…
If a headless worm can regrow a memory, then where is the memory stored? And, if a memory can regenerate, could you transfer it?Photograph…
Compared to the hectic rush of our bipedal world, a plant’s life may appear an oasis of tranquility. But look a little closer. The…
Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we…
I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a nuclear submarine officer running secret missions…
I’ve spent years adventuring in exotic parts of the world seeking out wildlife—weeks in tents in remote wildernesses, nights uncomfortably…
A spacefaring species could easily settle the entire Milky Way given billions of years. Yet the fact is that there is no obvious one…
One of the greatest debates in the long history of astronomy has been that of exceptionalism versus mediocrity—and one of the great…
Hybridization, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in how life forms evolve. The tree of life may never look the same.Photograph by…
Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech…
Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor…
Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves,…
Is our planet unique? The chances are slim. There are trillions of other galaxies, each of which has billions of suns. In a recent…
What is it exactly that makes humans so smart? In his seminal 1950 paper, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing argued…
We are all storytellers; we make sense out of the world by telling stories. And science is a great source of stories. Not so, you…
What Xenotext does is cause its audience to reevaluate their ideas of creation, both literary and biological.Illustration by GiroScience…
