We see countless stars and galaxies sparkling in the universe today, but how much matter is actually there? The question is simple enough — its answer, however, is turning out to be quite a ...

Much like Neo in The Matrix, one computer scientist explores how humanity could hack its way out of its own simulation.

The visible cosmos may contain roughly 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to a new estimate. The findings could have ...

I’ve started making my way (skeptically) through Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, and at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve also started keeping tabs on KurzweilAI, a Kurzweil-blessed site ...

Information could become the fifth state of matter alongside gas, plasma, liquid, and solid states. A scientist has proposed ...

The world's second fastest supercomputer — it used to be the fastest, before its rival machine came online earlier this month — has created the most complex computer simulation of the universe to date ...

File this one under "fun to think about, probably not changing your day job": a new study just dropped that suggests gravity itself might be the smoking gun that our entire universe is one big ...

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow ...

Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at CNET. She covered climate change, space rockets, mathematical puzzles, dinosaur bones, black holes, supernovas, and sometimes, the drama of philosophical ...

Scientific research is normally about chemistry but this time its history. Researchers are using epic computing powers to develop a simulation of the ancient universe. Some 13 billion years of ...

I was invited by the American Humanist Association to present the arguments of my paper “Natural Evil and the Simulation Hypothesis” at the national conference this past weekend. It was fun: I met a ...