Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice

“How we end up with similar circuitry was more flexible than I would have expected,” Zaremba said. “You can build the same circuits from different cell types.” Zaremba and her team also found that in the bird pallium, neurons that start development in different regions can mature into the same type of neuron in the […]

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Why Pigeons at Rest Are at the Center of Complexity Theory

By January 2020, Papadimitriou had been thinking about the pigeonhole principle for 30 years. So he was surprised when a playful conversation with a frequent collaborator led them to a simple twist on the principle that they’d never considered: What if there are fewer pigeons than holes? In that case, any arrangement of pigeons must […]

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The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast

I’m a huge fan of Star Wars. The first movie (no, not Episode 1) came out when I was young, so I grew up thinking about the Millennium Falcon and lightsabers. Perhaps it sparked my interest in science—even if it’s not exactly science fiction. Oh, there’s a nice way to start a nerd fight: Is […]

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