Author: Terrence Cons

Is giving up your biological secrets too bitter a pill?

What neuroscience is learning from code-breakers and thieves.

Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and […]

Brain-computer interfaces are getting very sensitive.

When talking about our health, we tend to refer breezily to “the immune system,” as if it were as simple as an electric fence keeping out invaders. And there’s certainly an electric fence component: The innate immune response is an ancient, relatively nonspecific kind of defense that triggers inflammation and the deployment of attack cells […]

Rags, riches, and fame in mathematics.

Fame drags you down.

In China, famous science pays like nowhere else.

Jodie Foster listens for aliens in Contact. Yesterday Science published a study including “strong evidence that Voyager 1,” an unmanned spacecraft launched in 1977, “has crossed the heliopause into the nearby interstellar plasma.” Don’t let the scientific understatement fool you—the researchers are saying that the craft became the first handiwork of humanity to slip out […]

Announcing the Nautilus Nobel Prize Futures Market