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Chapter one
Designed


When Stress Comes with Your Mother’s Milk
Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

How Alan Turing Deciphered Shark Skin
The universal math behind hair and feathers.
Chapter two
Spontaneous

How We’ll Forget John Lennon
Our culture has two types of forgetting.

The Dawn of Life in a $5 Toaster Oven
How a homemade piece of lab equipment is recreating chemical evolution on early Earth.

Echos
What happens when a person is simultaneously lost and found?
Chapter three
Missing

Why the Brain Is So Noisy
The surprising importance of spontaneous order and noise to how we think.

The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil
The idea that some species are relics that have stopped evolving is finally going extinct.

The Strangeness of Black Holes
From quantum information to the Schwarzschild radius.
Chapter four
Personal

How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time
Quantum mechanics rescued our understanding of past and future from the black hole.

Why Poverty Is Like a Disease
Emerging science is putting the lie to American meritocracy.

Gene Drives Reach Mammals
A new genetic technology that can quickly change entire populations gets broader.
Chapter five
Ageless

What Impossible Meant to Feynman
Physicist Paul Steinhardt remembers a great mentor and scientist.

The Real Secret of Youth Is Complexity
Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age.

Paradox Is Illuminating the Black Hole
How reconciling opposites is driving the science of black holes forward.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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