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The phrase “before the big bang” may contain its own contradiction. If time began with the universe, there was no earlier moment in which anything could happen. Yet cosmologists are no longer limited to philosophical speculation about that boundary. Sarah Scoles surveys three proposals that turn the universe’s origin into a scientific question by connecting radically different beginnings to observations that researchers could, at least in principle, make.

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The human brain takes in a torrent and thinks through a trickle. Eyes, ears and other senses collect information at roughly a billion bits per second, yet conscious cognition appears to run at only about 10 bits per second. In “Speed Limit,” Rachel Nuwer explores a striking mismatch that may explain why the mind feels far richer and more spacious than its moment-to-moment performance suggests.

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Mental exhaustion does more than make a difficult task feel unpleasant. It changes the calculation the brain makes between effort and reward, pushing people toward easier options even when the harder choice offers a larger payoff. Biomedical engineer Vikram Chib describes a small brain-imaging study that begins to show how this shift happens.

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The search for consciousness may be stalled partly by the question researchers are asking. In Scientific American’s October 2026 essay, philosopher Tim Bayne proposes that a familiar word might conceal an unreliable scientific category. Before building a detector that decides whether an infant, animal or machine is conscious, researchers may need to reconsider what that detector would measure.

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Conscious attention does not capture everything the brain learns. A study described by Nora Bradford in “Wandering Mind” found that people could pick up hidden regularities in a simple task while their thoughts were elsewhere. During periods of reported mind wandering, they adapted to those patterns faster.

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Solid-state batteries have spent decades in a strange limbo: always portrayed as the breakthrough that will make electric vehicles lighter, safer and longer-ranged, yet almost never available outside a laboratory or pilot line. The gap has made veterans of the industry wary of spectacular announcements. When the Finnish start-up Donut Lab recently claimed a solid-state cell with roughly twice the energy density of ordinary lithium-ion batteries, no rare-earth minerals and no fire risk, it released little supporting data. Independent analysis later indicated that the cell was actually a high-performance lithium-ion design containing liquid.

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Solar power’s rise is often told as a climate story. Stephanie Pappas’s feature makes a broader argument: solar has become a force in the world economy because it is now extraordinarily cheap, fast to deploy and difficult to embargo once installed. The technology still depends on concentrated manufacturing and supportive policy, but its fuel arrives everywhere for free.

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A collapse story that collapses under scrutiny

Rapa Nui, often called Easter Island, has long been presented as a warning for the whole planet. In the familiar version, its Polynesian settlers multiplied beyond the island’s limits, felled the last trees, exhausted the soil and squandered labor on hundreds of enormous stone statues. Hunger and warfare followed. By the time Europeans arrived, the society had supposedly destroyed itself.

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Why every hairy sphere needs a cowlick

A coconut poses a surprisingly serious mathematical problem. Imagine that every fiber on its surface is combed flat and that neighboring fibers change direction smoothly. No matter how carefully the job is done, at least one place must remain bald, stick straight up or otherwise break the pattern. This is the playful image behind the hairy ball theorem, a result from topology with consequences for weather, radio antennas and nuclear fusion.

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The cube trick that became a conjecture

A cube can perform a geometric trick that seems impossible at first: it can pass through a straight hole cut into an identical cube. The opening does not simply copy one of the cube’s square faces. By tilting the moving cube and choosing the hole’s orientation carefully, the passage can be made just large enough. The question dates to Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the 17th century, and shapes able to pass through an identical copy eventually became known as “Rupert.”