Developments in artificial intelligence often draw inspiration from how humans think, but now AI has turned the tables to teach us about how brains learn. Will Dabney at tech firm DeepMind in London and his colleagues have found that a recent development in machine learning called distributional reinforcement learning also provides a new explanation for how the reward pathways in the brain work. These pathways govern our response to pleasurable events and are mediated by neurons that release the...

On paper, it looks like Scott Larsen is doing better than his father was at the same age. At 29, Larsen has a college degree and earns more money, but he doesn't feel he's moving up in the world.

The “most realistic” plant-based steak to date has been revealed, mimicking the texture and appearance of a real cut of meat. The fake steak’s ingredients include pea, seaweed and beetroot juice, which are extruded into fine fibres to recreate muscle tissue. Its producer, the Spanish company Novameat, says the steak will be available in some restaurants in Spain and Italy this year before scaling up in 2021.

Mysterious seismic hums detected around the world were likely caused by an unusual geologic event — the rumblings of a magma-filled reservoir deep under the Indian Ocean, a new study finds. These odd hums were an unconventional geologic birth announcement. A few months after the sounds rippled around the Earth, a new underwater volcano was born off the coast of the island of Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.

The rapper recently lost his trademark fight against a real gynecologist. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled in a filing dated Thursday. Dre (real name Andre R. Young) opposed Dr. Draion M. Burch, who wanted to trademark the name “Dr. Drai.” The rapper claimed that Drai’s potential trademark would cause confusion amongst consumers, and suggest a connection between him and the gynecologist.

The actor Sacha Baron Cohen took the opportunity while presenting at the Golden Globes to take a swipe at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Baron Cohen was introducing "Jojo Rabbit," a satire about Nazi Germany as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy in the Hitler Youth that was up for two Golden Globes.

In an act whose implications are impossible to overstate, the United States has assassinated General Qasem Soleimani, arguably Iran’s second most powerful official. In the early hours of this morning, the entire Middle East stood on the verge of a regional war as the US Department of Defense announced it killed Soleimani in a “defensive action […] aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans”. But Soleimani’s killing will be seen by the Iranian government as nothing short of an offic...

The Archive of Contemporary Music is losing its space in TriBeCa.

Starting today anyone can legally remix and republish classics that include Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Gift of Black Folk, and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.

On a blustery Sunday in Okuma last spring, a crowd was seated under red-and-white tents awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They had gathered to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening, just a few days earlier, of the town of Okuma itself.

Published 500/500 current event snaps! Congratulations larylin on this achievement!

Over the past 60 years, NASA has explored the solar system from the sun to the Kuiper belt. While many of these missions, especially those beyond Saturn, have been one-shot flybys, others have charted many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn extensively by repeated orbital passes.

Is crypto a fad or the future? Cryptocurrencies have kept a relatively low profile in 2019 following a record-breaking rise in 2017 and then a spectacular crash in 2018. Are they worth revisiting in 2020? We asked these experts and Advisors in The Oracles to share where they think crypto is headed next.

The device could put us one step closer to near-limitless clean energy.

U.S. tax revenue as a proportion of GDP dropped the most out of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2018, according to a report released Thursday. That’s largely due to the $1.5 trillion GOP tax cut President Donald Trump signed into law in 2017.

Ocean temperatures are on the rise and warming waters are causing fish to swim for their lives, causing financial disruption and international conflicts.