From Lab to Life: 100 Key Questions

The science editor of The New York Times, Bill Wasik, has compiled a list of 100 key questions to which scientists would love to have answers… and do not currently have them.  The list shows how much we do NOT know – and for young people, how exciting it should be to spend a lifetime exploring them.

       Here are the first ten!  I urge you to look up the remaining 90, if you can.

• 100 Questions, By Bill Wasik,New York Times, Oct. 5, 2026

1. Did time have a beginning, when our universe was very small?

Juan Maldacena, theoretical physicist, Institute for Advanced Study

2. What preceded the Big Bang?

Adam Riess, astrophysicist, Johns Hopkins University

3. How many dimensions does it take to describe the formation and evolution of our universe?

Andrea Ghez, astrophysicist, University of California, Los Angeles

4. When and where did the cognitive capacities that made language, mathematics and complex societies possible first emerge?

Maxime Aubert, archaeologist and geochemist, Griffith University, Australia

5. Why and how did the human brain expand so quickly during the ice age?

Sean B. Carroll, biologist, University of Maryland

6. What is curiosity?

 Victor Ambros, molecular biologist, UMass Chan Medical School

7. How did the first Indigenous people enter the Americas?

Michael Waters, geoarchaeologist, Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

8. A million years ago, how did earlier human species colonize remote and previously uninhabited islands in Southeast Asia?

Adam Brumm, archaeologist, Griffith University, Australia

9. Why does full writing — complete sentences that can make sense to readers out of context — appear so late in human history?

Olivier Morin, cognitive scientist, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris

10. What is the form of human thought — words, pictures, something more abstract?

Evelina Fedorenko, neuroscientist, McGovern Institute for Brain Research