Thomas Nagel's 1974 paper argues that consciousness cannot be fully explained by physical science, using the example of a bat's echolocation to illustrate the subjective character of experience. He contends that even complete knowledge of a bat's biology does not reveal "what it is like to be a bat," highlighting the limitations of reductionist approaches to the mind-body problem.
A new paper by Thomas Bloom, Will Sawin, Carl Schildkraut and Dmitrii Zhelezov disproves a well-known conjecture in additive combinatorics. The result shows there exist arbitrarily large finite sets A of real numbers where max(|A+A|,|AA|) ≤ |A|^{2-c}. The solution was achieved by humans using methods related to an earlier AI solution to the unit distance conjecture.
John Burn-Murdoch guest-hosted BBC's Radical podcast, speaking with geneticist Sir John Bell about recent and upcoming medical breakthroughs.