Leading researchers in the arena of human enhancement are turning-back the clock by reopening “critical windows” for cognitive and physical development that until recently seemed to permanently close after childhood. Brian …
What are the special challenges, pitfalls, opportunities and rare triumphs of seeking and synthesizing the essence of someone whose passion—quantum physics, number theory, nucleic acids, atomic species, computational design, gravitational phenomena—is so thoroughly foreign to the concerns of everyday life?
Evolutionary paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro travels to the cold reaches of the world to find DNA samples of long extinct animals, such as mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. She hopes to learn …
Alien life has been a mainstay and fascination of science fiction, but who–or what–might actually be out there: biological life, artificial intelligence, or some combination of both? It took only …
Is the human brain an elaborate organic computer? Since the time of the earliest electronic computers, some have imagined that with sufficiently robust memory, processing speed, and programming, a functioning human brain can be replicated in silicon.
Imagine navigating the globe with a map that only sketched out the continents. That’s pretty much how neuroscientists have been operating for decades. But one of the most ambitious programs …