Learning to recognise birds may strengthen your cognitive reserve steve young/Alamy Expert birdwatchers have brain differences that may underlie their remarkable ability to identify unfamiliar birds and suggest that birdwatching can reshape the brain in much the same way as learning a language or a musical instrument does. Such activities may bolster cognitive reserve, the…
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just +0.2% year-over-year between January 2025 and January 2026. That marks a deceleration from the +2.6% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking…
Mafia: The Old Country demands to be played on an enormous screen. As much as I love my 32-inch Alienware OLED gaming monitor, it doesn’t do justice to Mafia’s cinematic vistas of Sicily. But, I also wanted to play that game in its full 4K glory, with none of the compromises of today’s game consoles….
Dwight Ellefsen/FPG/Archive The Laws of ThoughtTom Griffiths, William Collins (UK) Macmillan (US) FOR nearly 70 years, cognitive researchers have been fighting a civil war. On one side is computationalism, which argues intelligence is best explained by rules, symbols and logic that can be expressed in equations. On the other is connectionism, where intelligence emerges from…
Boom Supersonic wants to build the world’s first commercial supersonic airliner. Founded in 2014, the company set out to make air travel dramatically faster — up to twice the speed of today’s passenger jets — while also aiming for a smaller environmental footprint. For years, Boom has focused on developing the high-performance engine technology needed…
Ball x Pit, a delightful roguelite that was one of our favorite games of last year, is on the way to mobile devices. The chaotic brick-breaking action is coming to iOS and Android on March 12. There will be a free trial with no ads, and you can unlock the full game with an in-app…
Orlando Gili/Millenium Images Your friends are likely to have more friends than you do. Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal. It’s just about how networks organise. We can represent a friendship group as a network. Draw a node (dot) for each person and a line between two nodes if those two people are friends. By doing…
AI is reshaping how work gets done in institutions, both public and private. However, the impact is uneven—consumer AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, and Gemini are fundamentally mismatched to the realities of government work. That doesn’t mean government agencies aren’t turning to AI. They cannot hire their way to capacity, so they’re looking…
The team behind the beloved Dark Sky weather app has a new iPhone app called Acme Weather. The release comes after Apple’s 2020 , which it ultimately in 2022 after integrating much of its tech into the native iOS Weather app. Acme Weather is primarily designed to address the uncertainty inherent in most forecasts, as…
Your brain has a neurological trick for drowning out chaos olaser/Getty Images Recently, I was scrolling TikTok when my brain failed me. I watched a video of Donald Trump berating CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins for “not smiling”, after she questioned him on matters concerning sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And I scrolled past. I didn’t pause….
