Implications of no-free-lunch theorems

In the 18th century, the philosopher David Hume observed that induction—inferring the future based on what's happened in the past—can never be reliable. In 1997, SFI Professor David Wolpert with his colleague Bill Macready ...

Victorian medicine shaped modern concepts of race

Charles Darwin raised the question of whether darker skin is correlated with immunity to certain diseases in his 1871 book "The Descent of Man," an erroneous claim that reflected beliefs about the reality and fixity of race ...

Hundreds of copies of Newton's Principia found in new census

In a story of lost and stolen books and scrupulous detective work across continents, a Caltech historian and his former student have unearthed previously uncounted copies of Isaac Newton's groundbreaking science book Philosophiae ...

Tradition of petrified birds in the Dome of the Rock

On the southern exterior wall of the Dome of the Rock, a very important Islamic shrine in Jerusalem's Old City, there are two marble slabs, both carved from the same stone and placed side by side to form a symmetrical pattern, ...

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