Seven days; lots of science in the news. Here’s our roundup of this week’s most notable and quotable items!

Scientists who developed the theory of cosmic inflation, pushed the limits of microscopy, and discovered brain networks devoted to memory and cognition received top honors at this year’s Kavli Prizes. Awarded once every two years, the Kavli Prizes offer $1 million, a gold medal, and a scroll to exceptional researchers in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience—those who work to unravel the natures of big, small, and complex forces around us. This year’s winners were announced on Thursday, May 29 in Oslo, Norway and simulcasted at the 2014 World Science Festival. Alan Guth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Andrei Linde (Stanford University) and Alexei Starobinsky (Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics) won the 2014 Kavli Prize in astrophysics for their work in formulating the theory that the universe exponentially expanded in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. “When I first came up with the idea, I was extremely nervous that it would be wrong in some obvious way,” Guth, who was in attendance at the Festival’s Kavli Breakfast, said. “Fortunately, it didn’t fall apart.” The 2014 Kavli Breakfast Linde, whose work has focused on the possibility of multiple Big Bangs occurring, giving rise to a many-faceted multiverse, told the Kavli …

A packed house at New York University’s Skirball Center was in attendance for a reading of Alan Alda’s play “Dear Albert” on May 28, the first day of the 2014 World Science Festival. The work, drawing from the personal letters of Einstein (Paul Rudd), his first wife, Mileva Maric (Cynthia Nixon) and other figures in their lives (Francesca Faridany, who also narrates). It’s a humanizing, funny, and at times troubling peek at the heart of the man whom most of us know as just a metonymy for genius with fright-wig hair.

In the 1640s, the Scientific Revolution was already underway. A century before, Copernicus had argued that the Earth revolved around the sun; 50 years before, Galileo Galilei had supposedly dropped two balls of different masses from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to test the hypothesis outlined in his book On Motion. But as far as a popular movement, what we know of as science was still a bold new fad.

The modern era has already seen a measureable uptick in certain areas of brainpower. Since the 1930s, standardized test scores have been steadily increasing, a phenomenon called the Flynn Effect. You might assume that the rise in IQ scores is due to people doing better on basic math skills and memorizations—basically, anything we can study for. But what’s especially interesting about the Flynn Effect is that the opposite seems to be true: Humanity’s biggest improvements have been in abstract thinking and general cognitive functioning. One standard intelligence test is Raven’s Progressive Matrices, developed by English psychologist John C. Raven in 1936. The test is a series of 60 non-verbal multiple-choice questions that’s ideal for measuring abstract reasoning. A test-taker is shown a series of patterns in a 3×3 grid, with one picture missing; the person has to pick the right pattern out from multiple choices. It’s not the kind of test you can easily cram for.