If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade ago, with the questioning title, "The weirdest people in the world?" By some stroke of luck, or a divine favor from the science-communication gods, "weird" turns out to be an acronym for capturing the weirdness of people raised in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. WEIRD people, like myself and many of you reading this, are, unfortunately, part of a problem that still faces psychology, a discipline largely dedicated to parsing what all humans share in common: The field's research subjects are too damn weird. For too long, psychologists have focused their research on "one particular culture," Michael Muthukrishna, an assistant professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, told me. "To be honest, it's worse than that, because scientists were actually looking at a subset of that population, undergraduates, who aren't representative of less educated populations within the country."

An underreported aspect of the climate crisis is that archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, biodiversity, and distributions of flora and fauna--much of which modern people will never even know about--are disappearing at an alarming rate. I'm an archaeologist, and while I don't know how to solve the climate crisis, I do know what I want to contribute to our shared legacy: a comprehensive digital map of the surface of the planet and everything on it. Such a project will serve both as a record of the state of the planet as it exists now, to help scientists better understand how it is changing, and as a "virtual planet" that can serve as a precious gift for future generations. In June, I and other like-minded scientists launched the Earth Archive: a massive scientific effort aiming to scan the entire solid surface of the planet, starting with the areas most threatened, at a resolution smaller than a meter. This effort aims to use lidar technology, or light detection and ranging technology, which can map both the vegetation and the ground beneath it in three dimensions from the vantage point of a plane, helicopter, or drone.

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly's brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, who has studied a variety of animals, from locusts to turtles, has said, "Neural responses can be described by the same mathematical operation … in completely different systems." Vivek Jayaraman, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus, and a former student of Laurent's, believes that neuroscientists are on the verge of identifying some of these deep neural rules. Grasping them would advance another neuroscientific dream: to be able to predict animal behavior as easily as Newton could predict the behavior of a moving object. Jayaraman and a small number of researchers studying the brain's GPS have, in fact, already experienced the thrill of discovering one such rule.

For human travelers, the iconic moment of space exploration occurred a half-century ago, when Neil Armstrong planted the first human boot-print on the moon. But if you don't mind using robots as our stand-ins, the greatest era is unfolding right now on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is rolling across the rusty, dusty surface and leaving behind tread marks that spell out the letters "J-P-L" in Morse code. JPL stands for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA center that designed and built Curiosity along with three earlier Mars rovers. Collectively, these machines have racked up 46.4 miles of travel, tremendously expanded our understanding of the Martian environment, and energized the search for life in the universe. Everywhere the rovers have gone, they have discovered unexpected complexity.