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In the movies, a comatose patient can be unreachable one moment, just fine the next.

“That suggests there’s a clearly demarcated border between unconsciousness and consciousness,” said Joseph Giacino, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School…

Picture a scientist with a provocative hypothesis — something that defies conventional wisdom or verges on the outlandish.

Supporting the pursuit of that big, bold claim is the goal of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s new Extraordinary Claims, Extraordinary Evidence (ECEE)…

Partying the night before a big exam. Preparing last-minute for a work presentation. Running a 5K in a 10-pound Halloween costume. All are examples of what psychologists call “self-handicapping” — creating obstacles to success to order to bolster or protect one’s own…

Venki Murthy: Memory is just not something that’s stored on a tape and it just sits around, right? It’s really astonishing how you can remember anything at all. So for me, this now really brings to the point — where is the stability in the face of this constant onslaught? And that almost…

Long before modern pharmaceuticals, our ancestors turned to plants to find cures for ailments from infections to parasites to fevers. A new study by Harvard researchers reveals the deep roots of that relationship: Several hot spots of medicinal plant diversity correspond to regions with long…

A San Francisco pedestrian was severely injured in 2023 when a driver struck her, throwing her in the path of a self-driving car that dragged her 20 feet while attempting to pull over. In the complex circumstances and legal fallout of the crash, educators saw a learning opportunity for future…

The southern tip of South America was one of the last regions of the world to be populated by modern humans, but the early history of settlement has remained murky.

A new study by Harvard researchers sheds new light on this mystery with the discovery of a previously unknown ancient lineage…

A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities. The study is small and is not peer-reviewed, and yet it delivers a warning that even artificial intelligence…

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers…