If I glance at your passport, I am able to figure out — depending on where you are from — your age, your country of origin, your full name, your social security number, and your gender, among other things, and in order to retrieve these bits of information from your…

Thinking up a single theory that explains everything within the physical world is what seems to drive several theoretical physicists. From the dynamics of the largest cosmological structures down to the twists and turns of quantum systems at the smallest of scales. The leading position in the search for a…

How did it all start? How was our Universe created? What were the initial conditions? Were there any conditions at all? Is our observable Universe just one patch of many in a much larger universe beyond our reach? Is our Universe unique? Did it pop out of nowhere? Will it…

Taking a step back from our day-to-day activities can sometimes have an invigorating effect, as it allows us to pause for a moment, reflect on where we stand, and see where we want to go from there. This article gives a literal spin to this reflective exercise: Where do we…

We are not alone. Whether such statement applies to life forms beyond the planet Earth, is an area of active scientific research, but not the topic of this article. What we can say, however, is that these four words certainly hold when redirecting our attention to our inner being. Our…

The scientific field of biochemistry — the study of chemical reactions and processes in biological organisms — backed up by physical chemistry — the application of standard physical concepts, such as motion, thermodynamics, and force, to chemical systems — is most of the time sufficient to gain a thorough understanding…

We always appreciate it when explanations add up. There is a sort of soothing and satisfying effect that comes along and suffuses us when things make sense. Precisely for those reasons, what has irked many theoretical physicists for already several decades is the absence of the theory of quantum gravity…

It goes without saying that it is hard to observe something that we cannot perceive with our own eyes. Luckily, science and technology have come a long way in helping us to detect the unseeable. Think of optical and atomic force microscopes showing how the Shewanella oneidensis bacterium extracts oxygen…

Healing the planet, our animal peers, and our human species with a single formula. — It sounds rather implausible that there would be a single cure to heal our natural environment, reverse the rate of extinction of animal species, improve human health, and dampen the on-going changes in our climate. Perhaps there is one. More specifically, one that embraces a deeper acknowledgment of the relevance…