Language comes in many forms. An activity such as reading a newspaper, for example, can be described in concrete terms (“flipping pages,” “processing words”) or it can be described in the abstract ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Hashtags have become a standard in ...

Today we’re obsessed with data. Experts in every industry are finding ingenious ways to measure and depict millions of data points every day. But data is virtually worthless unless someone can look at ...

Thomas Downing, “Center Grid” (ca. 1960), detail (Image by the author for Hyperallergic) WASHINGTON, DC — The magazine selection in the visitors’ waiting room at the George Bush Center for ...

The tangled mass of tubing, disks and light bulbs unveiled before a packed meeting of the Royal Society of scientists in London looked for all the world like an outsize example of abstract sculpture.

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS ...