The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling ...

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing.

From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has “on” and “off” states, it can be used to store information. In a laptop computer, the ones and zeroes that make up ...

As a researcher investigating how electric brain stimulation can improve people's powers of recollection, I'm often asked how memory works—and what we can do to use it more effectively. Happily, ...

Abhishek Bhattacharjee, a computer scientist whose research focuses on computer architectures and systems software, was recently appointed the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science, ...

Why some memories persist while others vanish has fascinated scientists for more than a century. Now, new research from the Stowers Institute has identified the mechanism that makes a fleeting moment ...

There's a RAM shortage at the moment. RAM, as in random access memory. The memory computer keeps immediately at hand, so it can perform tasks quickly. How can that be? Well, as with so much these days ...