A handful of mammals, including rabbits, have teeth that grow throughout their livesThurid_with_th/Shutterstock Rabbits’ teeth grow continuously, a process that may be possible due to the calcium they get by swallowing fragments of tooth as they grind their food. A...
New Glenn reached orbit (left) but Starship exploded, raining debris (right)Blue Origin; SWNS Compare these two scenes: on 16 January, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket triumphantly reached orbit for the first time, while SpaceX’s Starship burst into flames above the...
Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA chatbot at MITFrom the image archive of the documentary film “Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work” A groundbreaking chatbot created in the 1960s has been painstakingly reconstructed from archived records and run for the first time in...
In the quest for a reliable way to detect any stirrings of a sentient “I” in artificial intelligence systems, researchers are turning to one area of experience—pain—that inarguably unites a vast swath of living beings, from hermit crabs to humans. For...
An ion trap can control atoms for quantum experimentsY. Colombe/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY After decades of looking, researchers have seen a string of atoms go through a 1D phase change so elusive that it could only...
A robotic exoskeleton can train people to move their fingers more quicklyShinichi Furuya A robotic hand exoskeleton can help expert pianists learn to play even faster by moving their fingers for them. Robotic exoskeletons have long been used to rehabilitate...
Rachel Feltman: If you stubbed your toe right now, what sound would you make? According to linguists, the chances are pretty good that your answer would be surprisingly similar to the one given by someone on the other side of...
If you’ve ever done any public outreach work for astronomy—if you’ve given open lectures, volunteered at a stargazing event, written about the sky, done anything—then at some point you’ve had to warn people not to look directly at the sun.The...
One of my favorite anecdotes about prime numbers concerns Alexander Grothendieck, who was among the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century. According to one account, he was once asked to name a prime number during a conversation. These numbers,...
Dingo gap in Gale craterNASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS From H. G. Wells’s alien invaders in The War of the Worlds to The Martian‘s abandoned astronaut, we have long been inspired by the idea that life could reside on Mars – human or otherwise....
