Every Saturday we post a curated collection of our favorite articles and news from the week. But now that the year’s over, we’ll curate 2021 as a whole. It was another wild one. Tech companies continued to draw criticism for their roles in political and social scandals, most notably when

Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization—harvesting, then domestication of crop plants—began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilizations appearing 6,400 years ago.

Remember the philosophical argument our universe is a simulation? Well, a team of astrophysicists say they’ve created the biggest simulated universe yet.  But you won’t find any virtual beings in it—or even planets or stars. The simulation is 9.6 billion light-years to a side, so its smallest

In 1953, a Harvard psychologist thought he discovered pleasure—accidentally—within the cranium of a rat. With an electrode inserted into a specific area of its brain, the rat was allowed to pulse the implant by pulling a lever. It kept returning for more: insatiably, incessantly, lever-pulling. In

Comparing brains to computers is a long and dearly held analogy in both neuroscience and computer science. It’s not hard to see why. Our brains can perform many of the tasks we want computers to handle with an easy, mysterious grace. So, it goes, understanding the inner workings of our minds can