Do you want to try before you buy? Use a Windows 11 simulator and see how the operating system fares for you.

With Simon DeDeo on cosmic microwaves and crime.

Scientists are to bring Neanderthal “miniature brains” to life to see how humans differ to their closest relatives. The tiny blobs of tissue, around the size of a lentil, will be grown from human stem cells edited to contain Neanderthal DNA, according to reports. The so-called brain organoids are incapable of thoughts or feelings but will replicate the basic structures of an adult brain.

This is why we can’t have nice things. Did you ever have the feeling that people are talking behind your back, but you can’t quite make out what they’re saying? Imagine for a minute if instead of people, there were artificial intelligence (AI) bots plotting and scheming in the background — and to make matters worse, they’ve been communicating in their own language.

In all likelihood, a Martian colony won't resemble a silver city rising in stark contrast to the planet's signature red soil. Instead, it will blend right in, especially if a new, intriguing discovery pans out. Engineers from the University of California in San Diego have created bricks composed of simulated Martian regolith (soil). Amazingly, these basic building blocks turned out to be stronger than steel-reinforced concrete!

Researchers from the University of Chicago made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth’s sun accompanied by international team of scientists. The reason researchers took interest for investigating the so-called solar twins is their extreme similarity to the sun.

“Photons also have particle-like behavior, though, so when we think of reflection it’s easy to think of them as bouncing off the mirror—like the tennis ball in our earlier analogy—when the reality of the scenario is a little wavier.” By Stephen Skolnick.

Have some fun with gravity.

By far the best moment of Recode's annual Code Conference was when Elon Musk took the stage and explained that though we think we're flesh-and-blood participants in a physical world, we are almost certainly computer-generated entities living inside a more advanced civilization's video game. Don't believe me? Here's Musk's argument in full...

If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Researchers pondered the controversial notion Tuesday at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History. Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the...

A very pretty way to predict the solar storms that could take out our power grids. By Sarah Fecht.

What if our universe is something like a computer simulation, or a virtual reality, or a video game? The proposition that the universe is actually a computer simulation was furthered in a big way during the 1970s, when John Conway famously proved that if you take a binary system, and subject that system to only a few rules (in the case of Conway’s experiment, four); then that system creates something rather peculiar.

Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf opens up about his dense debut EP, Ecologies.