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Researchers say it’s the night — not the darkness — that we fear.

Robots have already bested humans in chess and Jeopardy; now, developers are trying to create the next poker master.

AI will throw a wrench into many of our theological foundations. How will we adapt? 

Why is the word such a wet blanket? Scientists investigate.

NASA just posted all 8,400 photos from all 12 Apollo missions to Flickr. Here are the best in full, original resolution. “Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in […]

American stuff is the stuff of American history, as recorded in still life painting.

We surprise the world’s brightest minds with ideas they’re not at all prepared to discuss. Check out our promo and subscribe now. Episode 1 launches 6/20/15.

The author of a now 30-year-old article thought he was writing the obituary of the laptop computer. Such wrongness makes you wonder what current underrated technology could be compared to the once-maligned laptop.

New robot seeks to bring convenience to your life, and can master new tasks on the fly.

How many cumulative hours have you wasted waiting for your chat partner to respond to you? A new program created by an MIT Ph.D. student offers an opportunity to make your instant message intermissions as productive as possible.

Trolling isn’t just the actions of ornery black sheep on the web. Jonathan Zittrain explains that it’s a set of behaviors due to be studied more intently in the coming years.

NASA’s New Horizons probe is on a road trip to Pluto and sending back some illuminating imagery on the way.

The once-revolutionary technology is headed for the landfill, but it offers advantages that modern video formats can’t match.

Writing is a recent innovation in the history of human evolution. So, how then is it that our brains organize this skill?

Researchers have studied how towns, less influenced by tech, sleep. They’ve found these people’s wake/sleep cycles mimic the sun’s. So, what can be done to save the tech-addicted cities?

An autonomous 18-wheeler has been given a license to drive the long stretches of open road that crisscross Nevada.

Singularity University’s Peter Diamandis discusses one way in which virtual reality — a burgeoning exponential technology — will disrupt unexpected sectors of culture and society.

Dance classes are low in physical activity, study says, but there’s more to the story.

A 29-year-old tutor faces felony charges after allegedly hacking into a California high school’s network to change students’ grades. The maximum sentence is 16 years in prison. 

“Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does with it.”

A recent study finds that real-world stereotypes continue to exist in virtual worlds.

What happens when you let a computer determine each child’s personalized curriculum? Math teachers in several schools across America are seeing results through a growing brand of “blended learning.”

Our reliance on technology is hurting our memories — we load names, dates, and numbers into our smartphones that we cannot recall on our own. However, this offloading of information allows us to free up cognitive space to learn more.

In collaboration with Exponential Finance

“Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that. That’s why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.”

New word tools can sometimes avoid old confusions. Let’s use “praxotype,” “cognotype,” and “technomorphic” to see human nature more accurately. Especially to see that we’re the least genetically constrained species ever.

Up until the 1980s women made up a large part of the computing industry with 37 percent of women graduating with degrees in Computer Science. So, what happened to all the women? Advertising.

Information Theory explicitly ignores meaning. Its focus on messages makes it uninformative about their effects. And limits the usefulness of its way of quantifying information. 

There’s no such thing as absolute time, but after 13.8 billion years, is anything relatively different? “The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since […]

Game theorists have cracked Texas Hold’em poker by creating an algorithm that bluffs, learns from previous mistakes, and makes smart decisions despite lacking perfect information.