We look around us—constantly. But how often do we listen around us? Sound is critically important to our bodies and brains, and to the wider natural world. In the womb, we hear before we see.

How fast is the universe expanding? Two prominent approaches are finding different answers, propelling cosmology toward a crisis. Wendy Freedman, a renowned astronomer who has spent decades seeking the expansion …

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 …

Time allows us to live in the moment, reflect on the past, plan for the future. It’s our most familiar, precious, yet mysterious commodity.

As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer?

Intelligence was once thought to be uniquely human. But researchers have discovered astonishing cognitive abilities in many other species—not just our close cousins like chimps, or fellow mammals like dolphins—but …