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Entropy's inexorable push towards chaos seems to give structure to the universe, says Michael Brooks. So why can nobody agree on what it is?.

Nobody knows what happens when you enter a black hole, but there is no shortage of ideas. Chelsea Whyte lets you choose your own unsettling adventure

When nobody would build a phone network for people in a rural Mexican village, they decided to go it alone.

People have become accustomed to the universe blowing their minds--perhaps too accustomed. Quantum weirdness--things like particles being in two places at once, or appearing to share a telepathic link--has been baffling all for more than a century now. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that nobody really understands the quantum world. Or as others have put it: if one thinks he understands it, then he definitely doesn't. So it is tempting to throw up their hands and say human brains can never grasp it. Here, Ananthaswany explains quantum weirdness which is just a matter of perspective.

Flying to space is just about the most dangerous thing a person can do. That's part of the reason nobody has ventured past the International Space Station since the Apollo program ended in 1972. But as government agencies like NASA and firms including SpaceX start to talk about putting humans on the moon and beyond, it is time to rethink how they approach risking lives in space. NASA will only approve a spacecraft for human use if there is less than a 1 in 270 chance of crew fatalities over the course of its mission. Here, Crane looks at the risks of space flight and who stands to gain from them

If you think you're incorruptible, think again. Nobody is immune, but understanding that may make dishonesty easier to counteract

In a deterministic world nobody could be held responsible for their actions and anarchy would reign… If it weren't for a glitch in human psychology

Australia's east coast is lashed by huge storms called "extreme east coast lows" every 10 to 20 years. Their rarity makes them hard to predict. Meteorologists did not foresee the severity of the Jun 8, 2007 storm, for example, in which a coal ship ran aground. "Most forecasters would only see one such event during their careers, and nobody working on the forecast desk at the time had ever seen anything like it," says Stuart Browning at Macquarie University in Sydney. They collected temperature and pressure data from a handful of weather stations that have records back to the 1850s. They also studied coastal erosion to see when storm damage occurred.

An odd 380-million-year-old fossil that looks like a worm might be the last known survivor of an early form of life. But some palaeontologists are sceptical. The Ediacarans were some of the earliest multicellular life forms. They were weird, bag-like organisms, a few millimetres thick and up to 2 metres long. Nobody knows if they were animals, plants or something else Ediacarans first appear in the fossil record about 600 million years ago. They are thought to have vanished 60 million years later, after animals burst onto the scene in the Cambrian period. They may all have beeneaten.

The universe may be awash with wandering, rejected moons, expelled from their planets' orbit long ago. Nobody has ever conclusively seen a moon orbiting a planet in another star system. While their small size and great distance makes them tough to find, it is also possible that there just aren't very many out there anymore. Sean Raymond at French national research agency the CNRS in Paris and his colleagues used simulations to figure out what happens to moons as their planets are still forming.

Google has come up with a strategy for demonstrating quantum supremacy, the claim that quantum computers can perform tasks that no current computers can. While it's widely assumed that we will eventually reach quantum supremacy, nobody has done it yet because current quantum computers can only run a few specialized algorithms. The plan is based on simulating coin flips. An ordinary computer does this by storing two numbers and choosing one of them at random for each flip. To simulate 50 coin tosses, it selects 50 times in a row. This is simple with regular coins, but if the coins behave like particles obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, things get more complicated

A summary of a massive mathematical proof that has baffled mathematicians for the past five years aims to help people get to grips with the key ideas. The original proof is of the long-standing ABC conjecture that explores the deep nature of numbers, centered on the simple equation a + b = c. The conjecture has been thought for some time to be true, and in 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University in Japan produced a proof to settle the matter. Unfortunately, it was 500 pages long and developed a whole new type of mathematics called inter-universal Teichmuller theory that nobody at the time could really understand

Here, Pistono argues that people urgently need to test a universal basic income before a wave of job-killing technology hits. Today, with the rise of machine-learning algorithms and advanced robotics, many have changed their view. It's possible that within 20 years almost half of all jobs will be lost to machines, and nobody really knows how all are going to cope with that. Those who still have faith in technology's power to create jobs fail to recognize the shift to a "superstar economy," where a handful of companies disrupt markets, make billions and employ very few people, while the rest fight for the scraps.

Astronomers thought white dwarfs gained mass from a companion star, but about half of the type la supernovae show no signs of a companion. Now Joseph Bramante at Northwestern University in Massachusetts says dark matter could provide the missing mass. Dark matter makes up most of the mass in the universe but shuns contact with ordinary matter. Since it has mass and responds to gravity, it should pool inside the dense white dwarfs. Assuming that dark matter particles are fairly heavy and can interact with each other in some way, they could increase the white dwarf's density enough to make it explode. To test whether this is really happening, Bramante suggests looking for type la supernovae in areas with lots of dark matter, the central region of a galaxy, say, and checking to see if their progenitor stars differ from what are expected. Dejan Stojkovic of the State University of New York at Buffalo says the model sounds reasonable, but remains cautious. It depends on dark matter having specific properties, and nobody knows yet what kind of particles make up dark matter.

Strips of land linking wildlife reserves are one of the most widely used tools in conservation. Shame nobody checked that they work, says Fred Pearce

Deep inside Earth's crust, the same kinds of microorganism are found wherever we look. Nobody knows how they became so widespread

When psychiatrist Bruce Perry was called in by staff at a paediatric hospital in Houston, Texas, the first thing he heard was an eerie, animal-like shriek. Turning around, he saw a bony 6-year-old boy in an iron crib with plywood wired to the top, throwing faeces, then whimpering a primitive lullaby as he rocked back and forth, soaked in urine. Unable to cope with the child's violent outbursts, staff at the hospital had built a cage to restrain him. So who was the boy, and how had he ended up like this? In a new book, Perry tells the story of “Justin” and other traumatised children whose lives, he believes, hold important lessons as we try to integrate psychiatry with the cutting edge of neurology. Liz Else caught up with him

You don't come across many Nobel prizewinners who believe in the paranormal, but Brian Josephson is one of them. After receiving the Nobel prize in physics for his research on superconductivity, his work has taken a very different direction. As well as using mathematics to describe how the brain carries out complex tasks, he is an advocate for cold fusion and other phenomena on the fringes of science. He talked to Alison George about why he thinks scientists have an irrational bias against unconventional ideas.

Out of cite From Virginia Trimble, Samuel Arbesman (22 September, p 36) and subsequent letters such as Alan Bundy's (20 October, p 31) seem to have missed a major reason for old, very important papers being cited less often as time goes on. The term in Scientometrics is incorporation , meaning that the result has become so integral a part of a discipline that no one feels the need to cite the original paper. I have dubbed this the second order Mossbauer effect : nobody who now uses Mossbauer spectroscopy feels the need to cite original papers on his effect. Letter to the editor. New Scientist. 11/24/2012, Vol. 216 Issue 2892, p33.

Athletes who place a pressure cuff on their arms while exercising have seen intriguing improvements in their performances, but nobody quite knows why

Could Christiana Figueres have the world's toughest job: getting all nations to agree how to tackle climate change? We talk to the UN's climate chief

The most effective way for critics of M-theory to win their case would be to come up with a better alternative. So far nobody has

The hottest water on Earth is squirting from vents in the South Atlantic, where nobody expected to find it

Many death row inmates never make the final journey from prison cell to execution chamber – but nobody really understood who will be spared, until now