10/11/2021 – What if you could get an estimate of your Elo rating just by doing a single test, as opposed to playing a couple of dozen games at long time controls? It isn’t an exaggeration to say this sounds like one of those inane personality ‘quizzes’ you see in supermarket magazines. But this proposal was the subject of a university study to do just that. Try it yourself!

9/14/2019 – An ongoing topic of scientific inquire of interest to chess fans is whether and to what extent chess can delay or mitigate the effects of aging. An Australian study aimed to prove that chess champions have a higher life expectancy than the average population. Grandmasters from Eastern Europe should therefore have a life expectancy of up to 14 years. PETER MUENDER dealt critically with the study results.

12/13/2018 – The Kasparov Chess Foundation (KCF) and The Chess Club and Scholastic Center of Saint Louis (CCSCSL) have run the very successful Young Stars program for 'Team USA' for the past six years. Meet the latest crop of talented kids from the recent New York training session. Plus, In a new article, Garry Kasparov reminds us that the recent World Championship match did not represent "a contest between the two strongest chess players on the planet, only the strongest humans." Brute force programs have long exceeded human playing strength. But that does not end the historical role of chess as a laboratory of cognition. A new pure AI system has superseded even those programs. Kasparov evaluates AlphaZero's play in Science Magazine and gives a political interview in the prestigious magazine The New Yorker. | Photo DeepMind Technologies, Igor Khodzinskiy

5/30/2018 – Is there a correlation between the strength in chess of players and their ability to recall a position in chess using short-term memory? This was the research question of a budding young scientist, QIYU ZHOU, who gave professional and casual chess players positions to study and then attempt to reconstruct them within 30 seconds. Her results are meticulously documented in a paper we are pleased to publish. At the end, there is an appeal to our readers to help with associated material.

3/21/2018 – People are generally worried about draws, which are often considered “boring”, where games may last up to six hours. To the common viewer (non-chess player), this may seem dull, and many believe this has led to a decline in sponsorship. But what do the statistics tell us? Using data now available, Qiyu Zhou, a remarkably young scientist has undertaken a thorough study of the numbers and provides a paper on her findings.

3/10/2017 – Dr. Chandramallika Basak is one of the leading researchers in the area of working memory and cognitive control, training strategies, cognitive and brain plasticity, aging, and biomarkers of complex skill learning (e.g., video games). She has now begun research on children and chess. Alexey Root attended Dr. Basak’s lecture “Cognitive Benefits of Learning to Play Chess and Other Strategy Games” and reports here.

3/6/2017 – While comparisons between chess and mathematics and chess and science are not new, with greats such as Feynman elaborating, the article here is more than yet another comparison, it is an actual lesson that will appear in high school physics classes in Crete. Enjoy this excellent article by physicist Ioannis Halkias.

1/24/2017 – The famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, a tireless promoter of science, and considered by many as the spiritual successor of Carl Sagan, opened Game Eight of the World Championship Match. He accepted to sit down with a few journalists for a casual conversation where he talked about his connection with chess and what he finds interesting about chess and chessplayers, as well as how he sees it relative to education. A revealing piece.

2/21/2015 – He was an American theoretical physicist, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965: Richard Feynman is considered to be one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and due to a remarkable series of lectures and interviews he became one of the best-known scientists in the world. Here's one interview you should not miss.

10/14/2014 – The hip-hop artist GZA, who belongs to the Wu-Tang Clan, one of the greatest rap groups ever, breaks many of the prejudices often associated with the genre. He is passionate about science, and is a sponsor of the school program Science Genius, and loves to play chess. VICE published an article in which the artist was challenged to a game with Zach Schwarz.