Dan Falk

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare

April 19, 2024

A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.

Q&A

Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

September 30, 2021

How does consciousness arise in mere flesh and blood? To the neuroscientist Anil Seth, our organic bodies are the key to the experience.

Q&A

Why Extraterrestrial Life May Not Seem Entirely Alien

March 18, 2021

The zoologist Arik Kershenbaum argues that because some evolutionary challenges are truly universal, life throughout the cosmos may share certain features.

Q&A

This Cosmologist Knows How It’s All Going to End

June 22, 2020

The astrophysicist and social media phenom Katie Mack is ready to tell you about the fate of the universe.

Arrows of Time

May 4, 2020

The human mind has long grappled with the elusive nature of time: what it is, how to record it, how it regulates life, and whether it exists as a fundamental building block of the universe.

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

March 11, 2019

The latest AI algorithms are probing the evolution of galaxies, calculating quantum wave functions, discovering new chemical compounds and more. Is there anything that scientists do that can’t be automated?

Q&A

Eclipse Hunter Reveals the Science That Can Only Be Done in the Dark

August 10, 2017

Even in the age of sun-observing satellites, astronomers like Jay Pasachoff still seek out total solar eclipses for the tales they can tell about our sun.

A Debate Over the Physics of Time

July 19, 2016

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass.

New Support for Alternative Quantum View

May 16, 2016

An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that eliminates the most baffling features of the subatomic universe.

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