Distinguished explorer and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has made incredible discoveries in the search for human ancestors. Many of those discoveries are now at the heart of the latest free online course available at World Science U. All students who share Lee Berger’s curiosity about the origin of humans are now invited to follow along on his expeditions in the new Master Class, “Exploring Our Humanity.”

The season for celebrating the joy of giving is here and nothing says ‘I don’t like Black Friday either so I thoughtfully purchased this online weeks later’ more than shipping one of the excellent gifts in this list to yourself, wrapping it up, and handing it to that special scientific someone in your corner of the solar system.

Come for the sun and the sand. Stay for the string theory and the space-time. A collection of the world’s leading thinkers on subjects like astrophysics, string theory, and much more will gather in Brisbane, Australia, this coming March for a full slate of conversations, performances, and events that all explore what makes our universe tick. Fans of science have a lot to choose from.

The challenge of piecing together how the fundamental laws of nature work has been with us since our ancestors started looking up and asking the big questions. Centuries of scientific exploration bring us to what we know right now, including our understanding of quantum mechanics up to general relativity. But that body of knowledge essentially ends on the doorstep to a black hole. The edge of a black hole is called the event horizon and scientists say that studying these horizons — literally, the edges of physical reality – may finally start to reveal answers to questions that keep modern physicists up at night. Those questions are at the core of “The Edges of the Universe” with physicist Andrew Strominger.

If you’re familiar with any of the women who helped shape the computer age, the name of Ada Lovelace might ring a bell, but you should definitely also familiarize yourself with the name Grace Hopper. A colorful Navy veteran (the 11th woman to earn a doctorate in math from Yale University), Hopper reported for duty at Harvard University in 1944, expecting to be working on cryptography projects. But she ended up working with computer pioneer Howard Aiken on the “Mark I,” a 51-foot long, 8-foot tall electro-mechanical computer built to tackle advanced mathematics problems. A successor to the punched-card reader, the Mark I computed math problems by reading instructions from a punched paper tape and had 1,440 switches for manually entering data.