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This month’s issue offers multiple perspectives on catalysts in science, from cosmology to medicine, neuroscience to physics. It illuminates the elusive agents of change that spark ever-emergent worlds.      

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Those plants, birds, […]

A game theorist breaks down the effects of inequality.

A masterclass on what science needs now.

Readers’ favorite posts explore a Dutch cure for stress and memories you can inject.

Readers’ favorite articles explore tree smarts and the end of the gene as we know it.

I design thought experiments to provoke dialogue about who and what we want to become.

Researchers found that people who set both superordinate and subordinate goals at New Year’s invested more effort into pursuing them.Photograph by marekuliasz / Shutterstock There’s a name for the sudden spur of motivation we often feel at New Year’s—the fresh start effect. You might also feel it on your birthday, at the start of the […]

It’s lonely to be an exceptional planet.

Why we need to branch out to solve global warming.