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Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts.

That is the diversity of views about the types of historical breakthroughs that matter, with a striking consensus on whether the long trail of innovation recorded here is now nearing its end.

The clearest example of consensus was the first item on the final compilation, the printing press

but is instead a stark, black-and-white video, a public service announcement that takes on a thorny issue that dominated the last presidential campaign and has divided people on the right and left.

“Embrace Ambition,”

“I can think of a lot of dirty words,” Ms. Witherspoon says. “Ambition is not one of them.”

these guys finally did what needed to be done to take a real stab at merging imaging and genomics

Brain imaging studies are expensive and, as a result, far too small to reliably tease out the effects of common gene variations. These effects tend to be tiny, for one thing, and difficult to distinguish from the background “noise” of other influences. And brain imaging is notoriously noisy: not only does overall brain size vary from person to person, for instance, but so do the sizes of specialized brain regions like the hippocampus, which is critical for memory formation.

persuaded research centers around the world to pool their resources and create one large database. It included genetic and extensive brain imaging results from about 21,000 people. The team then analyzed the collective data to see whether any genes were linked to brain structure.

the smart machines of the future won’t be humanlike geniuses like HAL 9000 in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” They will be more modest machines that will drive your car, translate foreign languages, organize your photos, recommend entertainment options and maybe diagnose your illnesses. “Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize,” Kelly writes. Even more than today, we’ll lead our lives enmeshed with machines that do some of our thinking tasks for us.

This artificial intelligence breakthrough, he argues, is being driven by cheap parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms. The upshot is clear, “The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add A.I.”

Two big implications flow from this. The first is sociological. If knowledge is power, we’re about to see an even greater concentration of power.

Add one more to the growing list of 3-D-printed products: human organs.

Within the next few years, Renard says 3-D-printed tissues could also be used in patient treatment, to replace small parts or organs or encourage cell regeneration.

Once the cells have been printed in the right arrangement, they begin to signal to one another, fuse and organize themselves into a collective system.

Somebody makes an important scientific breakthrough, which explains a piece of the world. But then people get caught up in the excitement of this breakthrough and try to use it to explain everything.

This is what’s happening right now with neuroscience. The field is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior.

Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.

Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains.

how vital it is, how life-changing, that we finally unpack – and discard – the sexist stereotypes and binary coding that limit and harm us.

she is out in the world, debunking the “pernicious” sex differences myth: the idea that you can “sex” a brain or that there is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain.

Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.

Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.

His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage

The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years

During the 20th century, the list got much longer. In came existential crises, midlife crises, energy crises and environmental crises. When Koselleck was writing about the subject in the 1970s, he counted up more than 200 kinds of crisis we could then face

Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.

discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.

"These groundbreaking discoveries have completely changed our view of the development and specialization of cells," the Nobel Assembly at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said.

Christie's blessing came as a bolt from the blue, and taught us once more to expect the unexpected. But shouldn't the establishment - and us in the media, for that matter - have seen the billionaire coming? After all, for years the Republican standard bearers have been vulnerable to a challenge from an anti-establishment candidate.

The most obvious reason for the decline of the Republican establishment has been the rise of anti-establishment adversaries. The Tea Party, an insurgent grassroots movement that emerged after Barack Obama's inauguration, has posed the most serious threat.

However, most of us made the mistake of interpreting the results of the congressional mid-term elections as a major setback for insurgents, because they failed to make more breakthroughs.

The technique is being hailed as a breakthrough in understanding how the trillions of complex cells in a body are descended from a single egg.

The human body has around 40 trillion cells, each with a highly specialised function. Yet each can trace its history back to the same starting point - a fertilised egg.

The molecular tape recorder developed by Prof Shendure's team at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, is a length of DNA inserted into the genome that contains a series of edit points which can be changed throughout an organism's life.

Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.

In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,

Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,

Building the best life does not require fealty to feelings in the name of authenticity, but rather rebelling against negative impulses and acting right even when we don’t feel like it. In a nutshell, acting grateful can actually make you grateful.

some people are just naturally more grateful than others. A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a variation in a gene (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have a heightened genetic tendency to experience, in the researchers’ words, “global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responsiveness and positive emotions (particularly love).” That is, those relentlessly positive people you know who seem grateful all the time may simply be mutants.

Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

are we losing the power to retain knowledge? The short answer is: No. Machines aren’t ruining our memory. Advertisement The longer answer: It’s much, much weirder than that!

we’ve begun to fit the machines into an age-old technique we evolved thousands of years ago—“transactive memory.” That’s the art of storing information in the people around us.

frankly, our brains have always been terrible at remembering details. We’re good at retaining the gist of the information we encounter. But the niggly, specific facts? Not so much.

Scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a new type of self-replicating computer that uses DNA to make calculations, a breakthrough that could make computing far more efficient.

Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill.

“The reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,”

“That is why you are seeing more attention to creativity at universities,” he says. “The marketplace is demanding it.”

I think most people’s ideas of science fiction are formed by Hollywood movies, so they think most science fiction is a special effects-driven story revolving around a battle between good and evil

I don’t think of that as a science fiction story. You can tell a good-versus-evil story in any time period and in any setting. Setting it in the future and adding robots to it doesn’t make it a science fiction story.

I think science fiction is fundamentally a post-industrial revolution form of storytelling. Some literary critics have noted that the good-versus-evil story follows a pattern where the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, the heroes fight and eventually defeat evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. Those critics have said that this is fundamentally a conservative storyline because it’s about maintaining the status quo. This is a common story pattern in crime fiction, too—there’s some disruption to the order, but eventually order is restored. Science fiction offers a different kind of story, a story where the world starts out as recognizable and familiar but is disrupted or changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end of the story, the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored. And so in this sense, this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is not that you should maintain the status quo, but that change is inevitable. The consequences of this new discovery or technology—whether they’re positive or negative—are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them.

Welcome to the future! Below, you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore's Law, future medical breakthroughs, the evolving geopolitical landscape and more.