The fate of the universe was supposed to be sealed by the turn of the millennium. “I imagined we’d be walking around holding a sign saying ‘the world is coming to an end’ or ‘the world is not coming to an end,’ ” recalls astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. But as Y2K soothsayers readied for impending doom, Perlmutter and his colleagues delivered a surprising discovery suggesting that the world’s fate would stay in limbo long after the Times Square ball dropped and any leftover champagne went flat. More than a decade later, scientists are still vigorously debating what the... (p. 30)

Move over Harry Potter, and take your invisibility cloak with you. Alice’s looking glass may be the latest bit of literary magic worthy of physics laboratories.Rather than using substances known as metamaterials to hide objects in plain sight, some scientists instead want to use the strange materials to build windows into worlds with fundamentally different physics. Peering in may reveal how other universes operate and how this universe — the one that avid J.K. Rowling and Lewis Carroll readers reside in — could have begun.Metamaterials can be engineered to have features very different f... (p. 28)

Numberland is a topsy-turvy place. In his new book, Bellos follows math’s counterintuitive twists and turns with the surprise and delight of someone rediscovering a long-lost landscape. After receiving a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Oxford University, Bellos left the world of numbers for the world of words — working as a journalist first in England and later in Brazil. Curiosity brought him back to math, and his return is captured in what could be described as a mathematical travelog. “I realized that I was behaving just like a foreign correspondent on assignment, except... (p. 30)

The Earth is going silent. Digital television signals delivered by cable and satellite are quickly replacing analog broadcasts and reducing the number and power of radio waves leaking into space. For viewers at home, it means more channels and pictures of unsurpassed clarity. But for scientists seeking signs of advanced civilizations beyond the solar system, this sudden radio silence makes the search fuzzier. Since traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, collectively dubbed SETI, have assumed that the path to intelligence proceeds similarly throughout the galaxy, SETI resea... (p. 22)