It began about a decade ago at Syracuse University, with a set of equations scrawled on a blackboard. Marc Howard, a cognitive neuroscientist now at Boston University, and Karthik Shankar, who was then one of his postdoctoral students, wanted to figure out a mathematical model of time processing: a neurologically computable function for representing the past, like a mental canvas onto which the brain could paint memories and perceptions. "Think about how the retina acts as a display that provides all kinds of visual information," Howard said. "That's what time is, for memory. And we want our theory to explain how that display works."

In June of 2007, Albert Tsao, a nineteen-year-old native of Silver Spring, Maryland, was working in Trondheim, Norway, at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience. Tsao was a summer intern in the lab of May-Britt and Edvard Moser, married researchers who were well known in neurobiology circles for discovering "grid cells"--neurons that, by tracking our position, create a navigational map in the brain. Grid cells are located in an area of the brain called the medial entorhinal cortex. Tsao was curious about the relatively uncharted region next door--the lateral entorhinal cortex, or L.E.C. After implanting tiny electrodes in the L.E.C.s of some rats, he set them foraging for bits of chocolate cereal in a series of boxes, some black, some white.

U.S. technology companies are converging on Taiwan to build regional research and development centers, drawn by the island's relatively low wages and the government's strategy of forging closer ties with Washington. IBM and Oath, the parent company of Yahoo, have all announced plans this year to build their research and development hubs on the island and to initiate large recruitment projects. "The approach of President Tsai Ing-wen's government to shift away from China and forge closer ties with the U.S. is a strong push behind many U.S. companies' investments over the past one year," said Gordon Sun, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research. Attracting investments from U.S. tech companies is part of the government's plans to build an artificial intelligence industry. Taiwan has pledged to pour 10 billion New Taiwan dollars ($326 million) each year into AI-related investments over the next three years.

Picture this: you're sitting in a police interrogation room, struggling to describe the face of a criminal to a sketch artist. You pause, wrinkling your brow, trying to remember the distance between his eyes and the shape of his nose. Suddenly, the detective offers you an easier way: would you like to have your brain scanned instead, so that machines can automatically reconstruct the face in your mind's eye from reading your brain waves? After decades of work, scientists at Caltech may have finally cracked our brain's facial recognition code. Using brain scans and direct neuron recording from macaque monkeys, the team found specialized "face patches" that respond to specific combinations of facial features.

Just 200 face cells are required to identify a face, the biologists say. After discovering how its features are encoded, the biologists were able to reconstruct the faces a monkey was looking at just by monitoring the pattern in which its face cells were firing. The finding needs to be confirmed in other laboratories. But, if correct, it could help understand how the brain encodes all seen objects, as well as suggesting new approaches to artificial vision. "Cracking the code for faces would definitely be a big deal," said Brad Duchaine, an expert on face recognition at Dartmouth.

When we look at a selection of faces, our brains can single out the familiar ones with no effort at all. This smooth process comes so naturally that most people never give it a second thought. But someone who does give this phenomenon a second thought is Doris Tsao, a professor of biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Over recent years, Prof. Tsao has conducted a range of experiments that have attempted to get to the bottom of facial perception. In earlier studies, Prof. Tsao and her colleagues used functional MRI scans to search for relevant brain areas in humans and other primates.