Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality.

The prestigious biennial Kavli Prizes recognize scientists for major advances in three research areas: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience—the big, the small and the complex. The 2014 winners, sharing a $1 million award in each field, will be announced live via satellite from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo.

Einstein dreamed of a unified theory of nature’s laws. String theory has long promised to deliver it: a mathematically elegant description that some have called a “theory of everything.” Join …

So you thought nobody could know what you’re thinking? Well, you’re right. For now. But fMRI brain research, identifying patterns linked to thoughts, is moving forward at a pace that’s surprising even experts.

Reader’s Digest has called “Mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin “America’s Best Math Whiz.” Returning in an encore presentation, Arthur Benjamin displays feats of mental mathematical gymnastics and shares the secrets behind his skills.

Black holes are gravitational behemoths that dramatically twist space and time. Recently, they’ve also pointed researchers to a remarkable proposal—that everything we see may be akin to a hologram.