Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a ...

One of the biggest surprises in molecular biology was the discovery in 1977 that coding information in genes is interrupted by non-coding sequences known as introns. Much has since been learned about ...

An aptitude for mentally stringing together related items, often cited as a hallmark of human language, may have deep roots in primate evolution, a new study suggests. But “this work shows that the ...

Recursion—the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind—has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A multi-institutional ...

Recursion -- the computational capacity to embed elements within elements of the same kind -- has been lauded as the intellectual cornerstone of language, tool use and mathematics. A ...