How Scientists Can Be Good Citizens
We have a responsibility to ensure that our discoveries are used in the public interest. That isn’t always easy.
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Illustration by Deanne Cheuk The Dark Ages Are Back
Americans must insist on academic freedom, or risk losing what makes our nation great.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic* When the Unnatural Becomes Natural
Artificial intelligence will redefine some of our deepest assumptions about the makeup of the world around us.
Illustration by Petra Péterffy The Transcendent Brain
Humans are evolutionarily drawn to beauty. How do such complex experiences emerge from a collection of atoms and molecules?
Amy Friend Life Is an Accident of Space and Time
Even if life existed on every planet that could support it, living matter in the universe would amount to only a few grains of sand in the Gobi Desert.
Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty This Is No Way to Be Human
We now occupy a nearly natureless world.
Nico Krijno Where Science and Miracles Meet
Recent speculations in physics reveal that believers and nonbelievers may have more in common than they think.
Balarama Heller ‘It Seems That I Know How the Universe Originated’
The theoretical physicist Andrei Linde may have the world’s most expansive conception of what infinity looks like.
Samantha Simon / Getty The Virus Is a Reminder of Something Lost Long Ago
In rebuilding a broken world, we will have the chance to choose a less hurried life.
Alex Merto A Cataclysm of Thought
In 1905 Albert Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old clerk, published five epochal papers. One was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Reading them today, our reviewer is thrilled by their genius
