Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality.

Thirty-five years ago string theory took physics by storm, promising the coveted unified theory of nature’s forces that Einstein valiantly sought but never found. In the intervening decades, string theory …

Bestselling author and religious historian Karen Armstrong joined Brian Greene for a conversation exploring humankind’s evolving relationship with the Earth, life, and the cosmos. To save ourselves and the planet, …

In recent years, machines have grown increasingly capable of listening, communicating, and learning—transforming the way they collaborate with us, and significantly impacting our economy, health, and daily routines. Who, or what, are these thinking machines? As we teach them to become more sophisticated, how will they complement our lives?

The deadly scourge of cancer has confounded doctors since ancient Egypt. Now, The Cancer Genome Atlas (modeled after the Human Genome Project) promises a new and powerful approach in this age-old battle.

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 …