Category: 7. SciTech

Neuroscientists know that there is a link between loneliness and cognitive decline in older adults, although it is still difficult to understand the exact magnitude of the link. A new longitudinal study provides evidence that a proportion of people who feel lonely end up having more memory…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Picture a bizarre training exercise: A group of runners starts jogging around a circular track, with each runner maintaining a unique, constant pace. Will every runner end up “lonely,” or relatively far from everyone else, at…

As new agentic AI models continue to come online, cybersecurity experts laud their ability to sift through vast quantities of data quickly and autonomously — making them great tools to help fight cybercrime.

But, they warn, those attributes could also be put to work by bad actors to hack…

Home to translucent shrimp living in sulfurous vents, methane-eating microbes, and corals older than the Egyptian pyramids, the deep sea is among the Earth’s most extreme environments. It’s also under threat — from climate change, resource extraction, and overfishing, said Jeffrey Marlow,…

Robert Wood is the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His courses include “How Music Works:…

There are a lot of good ideas floating around about the conditions necessary for life to develop, said Peter Girguis, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-director of the Harvard Microbial Sciences Initiative. 

What’s not known —…

The triumph of Homo sapiens over Neanderthals, a huge step in human evolution, was not the clearcut event that paleontologists have long believed.

More likely, it was the result of continued interactions — and even some interbreeding — with modern humans resulting from just one surviving…

It’s no longer necessary to know how to code to design a website or an app. Describe in plain English what the program should do, and an AI agent will do its best to enact the vision — a process termed “vibe coding.” The end result may have plenty of limitations, but it will be far more…

The history of the Earth is written on the great tablets of tectonic plates.

The motions of plates shaped land masses, formed oceans, and created the varied climates and habitats that set the stage for evolution and the diversity of life.

But this grand drama begins with a deep mystery:…

On April Fool’s Day 1976, two college dropouts, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and a friend, Ronald G. Wayne, formed a company from the garage of Jobs’ parent’s house in Los Altos, a small city in Silicon Valley then in its infancy.

For the cheeky price of $666.66 (Wozniak liked