Lately, the New York Times has been generating quality clickbait by getting insiders to help it draw up Top 100 lists, such TV shows, movies, and books. Now:
100 Unanswered Questions About Ourselves, Our World and Our Universe
We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.
By Bill Wasik
Bill Wasik is The Times’s science editor. This is the first of a series called Unknowns, about unanswered scientific questions.
Oct. 5, 2026
… Dr. Lieberman is one of 100 scientists to whom the writers and editors on The Times’s Science desk recently posed a query of their own: “What is a big unanswered question in your field?” Responses poured in from biochemists, quantum physicists, archaeologists, oceanographers, Nobel Prize-winning biologists, geoscientists, entomologists, you name it. …
2. What preceded the Big Bang?
Adam Riess, astrophysicist, Johns Hopkins University …
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 …
Dr. Carroll is referring to the Quaternary complex of ice ages that began 2.58 million years ago, not the most recent single ice age of 115,000 to 11,700 years ago. Neanderthals had big brains by then.
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 …
13. What kind of information — about people, places and other dogs — can dogs acquire through smell?
Alexandra Horowitz, cognitive scientist, Dog Cognition Lab, Barnard College
Beats me. Also, does my dog think I’m particularly stupid for my lack of smell processing cognition?
14. How do birds migrate with such energy efficiency?
David Lentink, engineer and biologist, University of Groningen, the Netherlands
How about butterflys? It’s ridiculous that delicate butterflys migrate each year from the Monterey Peninsula in central California to a mountain in central Mexico.
23. Why do animals that fly live longer?
Elinor Karlsson, vertebrate geneticist, UMass Chan Medical School and Broad Institute
Birds live bizarrely long. I used to see this little bird, grey with a black helmet like Darth Vader, who would sit every dawn on the exact same place on the telephone wire, with a couple of inches of the same spot daily. Then he’d disappear for six months, then return and sit at dawn in the exact same spot for six months. This went on for a dozen years or more. …
32. Did Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens share their lives and cultures as well as their genes?
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, archaeologist, University of Cambridge and University of Liverpool, England
33. What was life like for the Denisovans?
Jennifer Raff, anthropologist, University of Kansas
Poor, nasty, brutish, and short? [That would be a good name for a law firm].
34. Why did modern humans, and not other hominins, become so numerous and develop such complex culture and technology?
Svante Pääbo, geneticist, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology …
37. Why are humans the only species with a chin?
Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist, Harvard University
38. When in our evolutionary history did the human pattern of slow childhood development emerge?
Carrie Mongle, paleoanthropologist, Stony Brook University
Chimps are small and cute for six years, difficult teens for two years, then ugly bruisers for 50 or so years.
… 53. Can we decode the language of microbiomes?
Jennifer Doudna, biochemist, University of California, Berkeley
54. Will we ever decipher Linear A, Cypro-Minoan and other important ancient scripts?
Silvia Ferrara, philologist, University of Bologna, Italy
Seems like something AI could do through its ability to do boring things over and over until an answer emerges.
For example, in 1967, the People’s Liberation Army assigned 500 scientists to pore over the immense corpus of Chinese traditional medicine, most of which is quackery, but not all, looking for a malaria medicine that works to help the North Vietnamese infiltrating South Vietnam on the Ho Chi Minh trail. After 5 years (2,500 man years), the PLA found that artemisinin, an ingredient in an anti-malarial tea described by a sage in 1596, works. In 2015, the lady soldier in charge, Tu Youyou (great name!), won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Generally speaking, the world doesn’t have 2,500 expert man-years to throw at antiquarian questions. But now we have AI. …
58. How do humans create genuinely new concepts — not just random variations or recombinations of old ideas?
Alison Gopnik, cognitive scientist, University of California, Berkeley …
67. Why has evolution given human females a relatively narrow “Goldilocks zone” for successful reproduction?
Binyam Mogessie, reproductive biologist, Yale University …
69. How do children learn so much from so little?
Joshua Tenenbaum, computational cognitive neuroscientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology …
74. Most cancers are not genetic, so why do they occur?
Dr. Mehra Golshan, cancer surgeon, Yale School of Medicine …
80. Why do the viruses that cause colds and flu spread so much more easily in winter?
Linsey Marr, environmental engineer, Virginia Tech …
84. Can we learn what emotions animals are experiencing?
Tom Smulders, evolutionary neuroscientist, Newcastle University, England …
Tail-wagging vs. growling?
87. When did hominids first begin to ferment foods, and what role did that invention play in human evolution?
Rob Dunn, biologist, North Carolina State University
88. Who were the Sea Peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean and what was their role in the collapse of the late Bronze Age?
Eric H. Cline, archaeologist, George Washington University
I’d say they were Europeans early in their entrance into recorded history. …
94. Is humanity doomed by our nature to inequality and war?
Sarah Parcak, anthropologist, University of Alabama at Birmingham
The big question that’s missing because it so bedevils Americans that we aren’t supposed to ever even mention it is of course …
Paywall here.
