Status Updates From 13 Things That Don't Make S...

The explanation for why sex is so common as a reproductive strategy continues to resist understanding. You may never have thought too hard about it, but sex is a mystery.

... The central enigma is simply that asexual reproduction, where an organism produces a copy of itself, is a much more efficient way to pass your genes down to the next generation...

The puzzle is, why hasn’t asexual reproduction taken over?

Where there’s life, it seems, death is close behind, but nobody has a full explanation for it.

Webb put the case for coolness like this: "When we refer to the laws of nature, what we are really talking about is a particular set of ideas that are striking in their simplicity, that appear to be universal and have been verified by experiment. It is thus human beings who declare that a scientific theory is a law of nature and human beings are quite often wrong."

The laws and constants have helped us define and tame the natural world. But what if there are no immutable laws? What if the constants aren't constant? Or, as Webb puts it, a wry smile playing across his lips, “Who decided they were constant, anyway?”

Admitting that you’re stuck doesn't come easy to scientists; they have lost the habit of recognizing it as the first step on a new and exciting path.