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Three people are sitting on a bench: a wise man between two fools. One fool is called “Pointless.” They argue that the universe is cold and uncaring to human needs. We can try as hard as we want and plan as long as we can, but at the end of the day, the world will have its way. A bullet, a disease, a speeding truck, a single sentence from a powerful person — they’ll each determine our lives, so trying to plan is pointless. The other fool is called “Control.” They say we are in charge of everythi

When you look at the Sun, the light you’re seeing isn’t the light that’s being emitted right now. Instead, you’re seeing light that’s a little more than eight minutes old, since the Sun is some 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away, and light — although it’s fast — can only travel through the Universe at a specific speed: the speed of light. But what about gravitation? Everything on Earth experiences the Sun’s gravitational pull, but is the gravity that the Earth experiences as it orbit

If you were to break down the matter in our Universe to its smallest and most fundamental subatomic constituents, you’d find that everything was made up of individual quanta, each of which possesses both wave and particle properties simultaneously. If you pass one of these quantum particles through a double-slit and don’t observe which slit it passes through, the quantum will behave as a wave, interfering with itself on its journey and leaving us with only a probabilistic set of outcomes to desc

In my decades of playing soccer, I’ve taken part in hundreds of games. I’ve played in games where we dominated and lost. I’ve played in games where we were awful yet somehow scraped through to win. I’ve played in games where the other team cheated the whole way through with time-wasting, shirt-pulling, hacking people down at the knees (picture Paraguay’s shithousery against France in the World Cup) and still walked off winners. I hated it, but the result said they were the better side. Is that t

Intuition is having a moment. If you listen to podcasts or read nonfiction books, you’ll hear similar advice: trust your gut, listen to your body, follow your instincts. The trouble is that what we colloquially call “intuition” carries no label telling you where it came from. It can be based on expertise built over years. But sometimes it’s a cognitive bias. And sometimes it’s just fear. So it’s worth asking what intuition really is. The research points to something less vague and more useful th

We call AI systems “agents” all the time. But what does “agency” actually mean? Alan Love, philosopher and professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, argues that biology offers a more careful way to think about goal-directed behavior, function, and, eventually, machine intelligence. From earthworms reshaping soil to organisms selecting between behavioral options, living systems reveal forms of agency that are easy to overlook — and difficult to reduce to simple stimulus-response behav

If you want to view the Universe in a way that takes us past our current frontiers, you only have a few options. You can build a larger telescope: with greater surface area to collect light and a larger diameter to increase your resolution. You can polish your mirror’s surface to be more reflective and smoother: down to nanometer-scale precision. You can keep it clean and pristine: reducing your noise. You can build improved adaptive optics systems : better correcting for the distortion of the a

“Some people will hate what I say,” the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy tells me, “because it’s all about unweaving the rainbow. Some people want to retain the magic and don’t want to know why something’s working. That’s fine. But actually, for me, you know, the rainbow becomes much more interesting when you understand what is happening to the light that makes the rainbow like that.” Du Sautoy , the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the Univ

In parts of West Africa, getting sick used to mean navigating a maze of barriers — distance, cost, time spent away from work — before ever seeing a health worker. Muso set out to change that. Working hand-in-hand with governments, they built a model where professional community health workers bring care directly to patients’ doors within 24 hours, at no cost. And because these health workers are from the communities they serve, trust in the new process is already built in; they’re not strangers

The Sun is so much more than a shining ball of energetic plasma. This incredible still image from the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is the highest-resolution image of the Sun’s surface (i.e., photosphere) ever acquired. The image is taken at a wavelength of 416 nanometers, and showcases several features known to arise in fluid flow, such as the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS Its fluid surface is ocean-like: with plasma currents fl

You’re driving. Your phone is going off in the cupholder: three Slack pings, a text from your manager, an email stamped “URGENT” that is almost certainly not. Then your kid throws up in the back seat. It’s everywhere. Oh god, it’s everywhere. Now something — or namely, someone — actually needs you. There is at least one real emergency to deal with, and it involves a bucket and a mop, but your body has been treating the phone like a five-alarm fire for the last ten minutes, if not the last two we

Whenever you look at the Universe in a more powerful way than you ever have before, either in a new set of wavelengths, at higher sensitivity, on wider-field scales, or with novel capabilities, you open yourself up to a remarkable possibility. In addition to the “obvious” science gains that you’ll achieve from finding more examples and revealing greater details about the types of objects and events you already know about, you also give the Universe an opportunity to surprise you: by finding thin

A bolt from the blue that never strikes the same place twice: Lightning is the proverbial placeholder for the unpredictable. Nature’s light show erupts whenever and wherever positive and negative charges within a storm cloud collide with sufficient force. But if lightning is truly place-agnostic, why does it have a thing for cargo ships? Something odd in the skies above the strait Look at these paired maps of where the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea rub shoulders. The lower one shows a bri