Note: This article originally appeared on AiP on December 13, 2010. It won a Research Blogging Award. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge could be lost today. Technology seems to have put the ability to know almost everything within our grasp. So when researchers announce they “found” a previously unknown Peruvian language, it’s a pretty tantalizing [...]

We solicited readers’ nominations for the most annoying earworms yesterday via Facebook. We winnowed the list and now are presenting the poll below to ask readers to vote for the worst, most tiresome earworm plaguing us, thanks to supermarket music, radio and TV jingles, waiting room speakers and so on. Vote now to see the [...]

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. But the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm, a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with corn earworms). If you’re an academic, [...]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The last symposium in M.I.T.’s 150-day celebration of its 150th anniversary (who ever said that geeks don’t like ritual?) is devoted to the question: "Whatever happened to AI?" Of course, that is a particularly appropriate self-introspection for M.I.T. because a lot of artificial intelligence action occurred there during the past 50 years. The symposium [...]