Author: Frederick Stankus

Sea lampreys showing off their unusual mouthsJoanna Gilkeson/USFWS Several years ago, a young man bow-fishing on New Jersey’s Raritan river spotted a long, thin creature in the murky water. He shot the animal through the neck, reeled it in, and posed for photographs. Eventually a friend posted one to Reddit. Within days it went viral, […]

Condemned as a capitalist tool, the computer would help expose the USSR’s weakness.

Why the Great Red Spot refuses to die.

A survivor’s story is about to change.

The idea that some species are relics that have stopped evolving is finally going extinct.

How habits of speech can shape our thoughts.

The astrophysicist looks at the history of the world’s most famous telescope.

We’re living in the information age. We’ve uncovered vast stores of information in our genes, generated even more, interpreted physical law in terms of information flow—and we’re always on our phones. What is the difference between a fact and information? Does information need a consciousness to interpret it? Old notions of information, and our relationship to it, […]

Symmetry, on first glance a mere detail of arrangement, has unexpected powers, aesthetic, practical—even moral. We find it in physics, families, and the brain. As shorthand, it heightens our powers of observation, helping us recognize faces and calculate particle interactions. As organizing principle, it steers genes and galaxies. Scientists, long ago convinced that it is […]

Fundamental theories of nature aren’t allowed to hide information.