Numbers | Technology
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Chapter one
Fire
Numbers | Neuroscience
Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI.
Matter | Technology
Einstein’s Lost Hypothesis
Is a third-act twist to nuclear energy at hand?
Chapter two
Air
Ideas | Neuroscience
A Neuroscientist’s Theory of Everything
Karl Friston takes us on a safari of his free-energy principle.
Ideas | Economics
Drowning in Light
Technology has fed our addiction to light, and might help us end it.
Ideas | Artificial Intelligence
Could an AI Be Immortal?
Data is under attack and uploads his brain. Does he survive?
Chapter three
Earth
Biology | Evolution
T. Rex Was a Slacker
A natural wonder of the big theropod was how it conserved energy.
Biology | Psychology
The Power of Crossed Brain Wires
Synesthesia makes ordinary life marvelous.
Matter | Earth Science
Why Aliens and Volcanoes Go Together
Life on other planets may rely on plate tectonics.
Chapter four
Water
Biology | Evolution
Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest
A story for my grandchildren about oxygen, evolution, and our planet’s fate.
Matter | Aliens
The Trouble with Counting Alien Civilizations
Life on Earth is a sketchy guide to intelligent life in the cosmos.
Matter | Astronomy
The Mystery of the Dark Asteroid That Scorched Russia
A new theory emerges to explain the enigmatic Tunguska Event.
Chapter five
Spirit
Culture | Environment
The Idea of Entropy Has Led Us Astray
Let’s stop hustling as if the world is running toward disorder.
Matter | History
The Glassmaker Who Sparked Astrophysics
His curious discovery, 200 years ago, foresaw our expanding universe.
Biology | Earth Science
Uncovering the Spark of Life
What finding life on Mars could tell us about our own origins.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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Ideas
This Philosophical Argument Convinced People to Give More to Charity
Last fall Fiery Cushman, the director of the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard, and I announced a contest: We would award $1,000 to the author of an argument that effectively convinces…
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Culture
How the Pandemic Has Tested Behavioral Science
In March the United Kingdom curiously declined to impose significant social distancing measures in response to the global pandemic. The government was taking advice from several parties,…
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Culture
The Dr. Strange of the American Revolution
I ascribe the Success of our Revolution to a Galaxy,” Benjamin Rush wrote to John Adams, in 1812. He wasn’t invoking the astrological. It was commonplace then to associate a bright…
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Matter
The Black Sheep of Black Holes
The Indian-American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar once remarked that black holes, regions of spacetime whose gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape…
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