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Science & Research page 2
New research worth knowing about — physics, biology, medicine and the studies behind the headlines.
19articles
Neuroscientists still can’t explain why red feels like anything
Christof Koch has spent decades mapping the machinery of awareness, and he opened the 15th “Behind and Beyond the Brain” Symposium by pointing at the thing that machinery…
Not every atom in a molecule tells the same story [X-ray study]
Hit a molecule with ultraviolet light and something happens in about two picoseconds. Trillionths of a second. The trick has always been that you get one blurry answer…
Scientists scanned 15,000 bird skeletons and found evolution doesn’t work the way you’d think
A computer can measure a dead songbird’s skeleton in about 45 seconds. That number is doing more work in this study than almost anything else, because it’s what…
China just tested a 582-ton magnet, and the ITER comparison is the real story
A 582-ton superconducting magnet doesn’t get built for a science fair. China finished testing one, and the number that matters isn’t the weight. It’s that this thing stores…
Tesla’s robotaxi math doesn’t add up, and 3 numbers prove it
Tesla says its robotaxi program is growing. The numbers it released this week say something closer to the opposite. On an earnings call yesterday, CEO Elon Musk tried…
OpenAI says ChatGPT now out-reasons doctors. Its own health lead walked it back.
Two OpenAI executives sat in the same briefing this week and told a different story about the same product. One said the company’s models can now reason better…
3 physicists asked what happens if you cut a photon in half
Pull a mirror out of the way while a single photon is halfway through bouncing off it, and you don’t get half a photon going one direction and…
Claude just broke an 87-year-old math rule, and 1 professor isn’t buying it
A single line of algebra, posted while most of the planet was watching Argentina play Spain, claimed to end a question mathematicians had left open since 1939. That’s…
