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Gravitational waves let astronomers listen to cosmic violence that may produce little or no light. These waves are minute distortions of spacetime, set off when massive objects move dramatically. A new catalog described in Scientific American brings the number of detections since 2015 to almost 400. Among its standouts are the collision of the heaviest pair of black holes yet observed this way and a pair that spun at about 40 percent of the speed of light before merging.

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Earthquakes do not become catastrophic simply because a fault begins to slip. The rupture must keep racing along the fault, releasing stored tectonic stress as seismic waves. Jacek Krywko’s Scientific American article examines new evidence for the underground barriers that can abruptly halt this process—and for the distinctive shock wave created when they do.

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The discovery of the Higgs boson completed the Standard Model’s roster of elementary particles, but it did not settle whether those particles are truly fundamental. Jay Bennett’s Scientific American feature follows physicists asking what lies beneath the smallest things currently known—and whether experiment can ever reach the scale where a final answer would appear.

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The moon feels permanent because its changes are almost invisible on a human timescale. Phil Plait’s Scientific American column looks much farther ahead and finds that the moon’s future is not a simple matter of drifting steadily away. Its fate depends first on the tidal exchange between Earth and the moon, then on the loss of Earth’s oceans, and finally on the aging Sun.

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Dark matter presents an unusual scientific problem: researchers have overwhelming evidence that it exists, yet four decades of increasingly sensitive experiments have failed to reveal what it is made of. Joseph Howlett, a former member of the XENON dark matter collaboration, argues that this impasse may expose not only the limits of particle detectors but a limit on what science can know.

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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.