This video is part of our Brilliant Breakthroughs series: our new 20-episode mini-series exploring the “Eureka!” moments and proud accomplishments of the greatest scientific minds of our time. Join us …

What’s it like to face a faceless world? Acclaimed neurologist Oliver Sacks once apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize he was speaking to a mirror.

Every successful scientist seems to have a “once in a blue moon” discovery during his or her lifework: an accident or epiphany that unexpectedly leads to a serendipitous breakthrough. Geneticist …

While artificial intelligence lacks empathy, reason, and even basic common sense, we already rely on it to make major decisions that affect human lives. Who gets hired? Who gets fired? …

A self-driving car has a split second to decide whether to turn into oncoming traffic or hit a child who has lost control of her bicycle. An autonomous drone needs to decide whether to risk the lives of busload of civilians or lose a long-sought terrorist. How does a machine make an ethical decision?

The nature of time is an age-old conundrum for physicists, philosophers, biologists and theologians. The Newtonian picture of time—a kind of cosmic clock that ticks off time in a manner that applies identically to everyone and everything—tightly aligns with our experience. But with special and general relativity, Einstein showed the fallacy inherent in experience.