Companies like OpenAI and Meta are in a race to make something they like to call artificial general intelligence. But for all the money being spent on it, A.G.I. has no settled definition. It’s more of an aspiration to create something indistinguishable from the human mind.

Artificial intelligence today is already doing a lot of things that were once limited to human minds — such as playing championship chess and figuring out the structure of proteins. ChatGPT and other chatbots are crafting language so humanlike that people are falling in love with them.

Continue reading “Scientists Use A.I. to Mimic the Mind, Warts and All” →

If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.

“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.

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When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go on.

The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked as if it might have come from a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans, or maybe a Neanderthal. But Dr. Fu, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told a different story. The bone had belonged to a girl who was part of a third human lineage never seen before. They named her people the Denisovans.

Continue reading “Mysterious Ancient Humans Now Have a Face” →

Geography is one of the things that sets apart modern humans.

Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our species can thrive not only in forests, but in grasslands, swamps, deserts and just about every other ecosystem dry land has to offer.

Continue reading “When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere” →

You could be forgiven for assuming that scientists know how many kinds of proteins exist. After all, researchers have been studying proteins for more than two centuries. They have powerful tools in their labs to search for the molecules. They can scan entire genomes, spotting the genes that encode proteins. They can use artificial intelligence to help decipher the complex shapes that allow proteins to do their jobs, whether that job entails catching odors in our noses or delivering oxygen in our blood.

Continue reading “Shining a Light on the World of Tiny Proteins” →