There is little doubt that Mars will be the next step in our continuing march to the skies, with some predicting we will take that giant leap within the next …

For all their historical tensions, scientists and religious scholars from a wide variety of faiths ponder many similar questions—how did the universe begin? How might it end? What is the origin of matter, energy, and life?

Reader’s Digest has called “Mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin “America’s Best Math Whiz.” Returning in an encore presentation, Arthur Benjamin displays feats of mental mathematical gymnastics and shares the secrets behind his skills.

Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality?

Extra dimensions of space — the idea that we are immersed in hyperspace — may be key to explaining the fundamental nature of the universe. Relativity introduced time as the fourth dimension, and Einstein’s subsequent work envisioned more dimensions still — but ultimately hit a dead end.

For decades, inflation has been the dominant cosmological scenario, but recently the theory has been subject to competition and critique. Two renowned pioneers of inflation — Alan Guth and Andrei …