No body, no dopamine, no problem. Scientists have successfully coached lab-grown brain tissue to solve a classic robotics challenge, proving that the will to learn is hardwired into our neurons.

Imagine balancing a ruler vertically in the palm of your hand: you have to constantly pay attention to the angle of the ruler and make many small adjustments to make sure it doesn't fall over. It ...

Can you design a mechanism that will trace out the shape of a heart? How about the shape of a moon, or a star? Mechanism ...

A few blobs of lab-grown brain tissue have demonstrated a striking proof of concept: living neural circuits can be nudged toward solving a classic control problem through carefully structured feedback ...

In a small lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, clusters of mouse brain cells have taken on a task normally reserved for computer algorithms: ...

Eddy Keming Chen is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California, USA. Mikhail Belkin is a professor of artificial intelligence, data science, ...