Science Still Can't Answer These 100 Questions: From Human Chin to the Depths of the Cosmos

The New York Times, in conversations with scientists, has compiled a list of unsolved mysteries in science, from the origin of the human chin to the laws of physics.

Why only humans have chins? What determines the laws of physics in the universe? Can the aging process be safely reversed? Science has found answers to many human questions, but it is still silent in front of a set of simple, strange and sometimes very fundamental questions.

According to Zomit, the New York Times asked 100 scientists in various fields to raise the most important unanswered question in their field. The result is a list that stretches from biology and medicine to physics, archaeology, oceanography and earth sciences.

One such question is posed by Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University: Why do only modern humans have prominent chins? Even Neanderthals and Denisovans did not have such a feature.

The chin may seem like a normal part of the face at first glance, but it is a unique feature. Modern humans are the only species in which the jawbone protrudes anteriorly in this way. This simple feature has been one of the mysteries of evolutionary biology for years.

Lieberman says this question usually intrigues his students, too, though he jokingly calls it a "completely trivial" question. The problem is that the hypotheses proposed to explain the appearance of the chin have not yet been able to provide a solid answer.

Some scientists have suggested that the chin may play a role in chewing, jaw strength, or structural changes in the face, but none of these explanations fully fit the available evidence. One of the remaining hypotheses is "sexual selection"; It means that maybe having a chin was more attractive for some people in the past and this preference has caused this feature to spread in the next generations.

Proving such a hypothesis is not easy. To directly test it, Lieberman says with humor, one should show other people pictures of people without chins and ask if they find them sexually attractive or not; An experiment that he himself considers a very bad idea.

Of course, not all the questions in this collection are related to human appearance. Some of them deal with the subtle mechanisms of nature; Biologist Deborah Gordon, for example, asks how ants form the coordinated behavior of a colony without a central commander.

Some questions are more fundamental. Astrophysicist Katie Mack asks what determined the laws of physics in our universe to be exactly as they are. Questions about the possibility of safely reversing aging or sustaining wildlife trade also appear on the list.

The scope of these questions ranges from small and strange curiosities to issues whose answers can change our understanding of humans, life and the world. Many of them may remain unanswered for years or even decades.

What you are reading below are 100 questions from the current frontiers of human knowledge; Questions that still do not have a definitive answer and determine the direction of part of future research.