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
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
The next time someone hooks you up to a sleep study, those sensors tracking your brain waves and heartbeat may not just be looking for snoring problems. They could be capturing something far more revealing: a physiological signature that can forecast whether you’ll develop Parkinson’s disease, suffer a heart attack, or face dementia, sometimes years … Read more
About 20 percent of neurons in a learning brain seem to be doing something counterintuitive. When these cells become more active, mistakes follow. A new computational model of the brain, built to mirror real neural circuits rather than optimize performance, stumbled onto this pattern while learning a simple visual task. Only then did researchers realize … Read more
Before these systems ever see a single cat photo or traffic sign, some AI models are already humming in tune with the visual cortex. In new work from Johns Hopkins University, scientists showed that carefully designed, biologically inspired architectures can mimic activity in human and primate visual brain areas even when the networks are untrained. … Read more
Recommendation algorithms don’t just show you more of what you like. They actually change what you learn and how confident you feel about it, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Researchers at Ohio State University tested this with 346 people learning to categorize fake aliens: crystal-like creatures with six … Read more