Type a question into an AI chatbot and hit send. Now watch the cursor blink. Two seconds feels fine, barely noticeable. Nine seconds and something shifts: you start to wonder if the system is really working through the problem. By the time you hit twenty seconds you have either concluded the AI is doing something … Read more
Inside every cell in your body, a chemical clock is running. Not ticking exactly, more like drifting: patterns of methyl groups latching onto DNA, accumulating and shifting in ways that reflect everything you’ve done, breathed, eaten, and been exposed to across a lifetime. Researchers have spent the better part of two decades trying to read … Read more
The brain scans look unambiguous. After 18 months of treatment, the amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of early Alzheimer’s patients are visibly reduced, sometimes dramatically so. The drug is doing exactly what it was designed to do: hunting down those sticky protein deposits and clearing them away. So why aren’t the patients getting better? … Read more
Slapping a label on AI-generated content is the regulatory world’s current favourite answer to the misinformation problem. Transparent, scalable, required by law in China and under the EU AI Act, endorsed by Meta and X. The logic seems obvious enough: tell people a machine wrote something and they’ll scrutinise it harder. They didn’t, as it … Read more
You probably can’t explain how you ride a bike. Not properly, anyway. You could tell a beginner where to sit, when to push off, roughly how the gears work. But the subtle business of how hard to pedal to stay upright, when to shift your weight through a turn, the thousand tiny corrections your body … Read more
Somewhere in the archive of Humanity’s Last Exam sits a question about a Roman tombstone. Not the Latin inscription — that would be too easy — but the Palmyrene script running alongside it, a language spoken in ancient Syria and dead for seventeen centuries. The question was written by a classicist at Oxford, tested against … Read more
Somewhere in the visual cortex of a macaque monkey, a single neuron fires every time a small dot appears in the right location. Not a circle, not a line — a dot, specifically, at a specific size. For decades, neuroscientists could describe this selectivity without really explaining it. Now, for the first time, they can … Read more
At around midnight in a laboratory in Daejeon, South Korea, two robotic arms are working through a queue of 96 experiments nobody asked them to start. One grips a pipette, delivers a precise shot of sodium borohydride into a reaction vessel, and moves on. The other lifts a small cuvette, slides it into a spectrometer, … Read more
Imagine you’re a PhD student named Leo. You have two choices. You could spend the next five years in a dusty basement lab, trying to figure out a “weird” question about how the very first molecules of life sparked into existence. There’s no data to help you, the experiments often fail, and your peers might … Read more
Picture a task so simple it takes four minutes. Generate ten words. That’s all. Make them as different from each other as possible, in every way that matters (meaning, usage, the way they sound in the mouth). This isn’t a test you’d find in an IQ exam or written into the competitive frameworks that sort … Read more
A data-driven look at neuroscience and AI, for investors, policymakers, and innovators.