6+ day, 16+ hour ago   (928+ words) A massive genetic study found more than 1,000 DNA differences linked to human personality, revealing how genes help shape the Big Five traits. Personality can feel deeply personal, shaped by everything from childhood experiences to the way someone handles stress. But…...

4+ day, 18+ hour ago   (795+ words) Memory and consciousness may be encoded in the chemistry of the mesh packed around brain cells, not in the signals passing between them. Twenty years after you last heard it, a song comes on and the memory arrives with the…...

2+ day, 14+ hour ago   (1026+ words) Machine culture just got its first controlled test, and only one of 600 people playing on their own ever found what the AI did. Offered a sure gain now or a bigger one that costs something first, most of us take the…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (927+ words) DNA normally uses four letters. In lab tests, a bacterial enzyme successfully read eight, including four synthetic bases. All life writes with four letters. Because A pairs only with T, and G only with C, a cell can copy its…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1228+ words) To find buried prey, the elephantnose fish senses tiny electric fields while firing its own pulses. A brain map shows how neurons filter them out. In muddy African rivers, an elephantnose fish hunts with sensors in its skin that pick…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (1184+ words) Confidence builds a sense of control, and two brain circuits turn that estimate into how much you learn from a win or a loss. When a job application disappears into silence, you have to decide whether the resume was weak…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (999+ words) A new experiment reveals how motorboat noise during early development can have lasting effects on young reef fish. Coral reefs are full of sound. Young fish grow up hearing that natural chorus mixed with noise from passing boats. Small motorboats…...

1+ week, 17+ hour ago   (783+ words) Kids testing AI-powered toys were curious at first, but frustration quickly followed when the talking toys failed to listen or understand them. Talking toys aren’t new. Chatty Cathy pulled a string and spoke her lines back in the 1960s and Furby…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (936+ words) People turn to star signs for fun and personality tests for everything from jobs to therapy and dating. But creating a test that actually measures something meaningful can take years. GPT-4, the model behind ChatGPT, created a personality test based…...

4+ day, 9+ hour ago   (1083+ words) T cells see only a small sample of the body’s proteins in the thymus, yet a machine learning model shows how they can still learn not to attack healthy tissue. A T cell finishes its training having met a small…...