Two articles in The New Scientist grabbed my attention recently:
Is the universe conscious? It seems impossible until you do the maths
and
Black holes are hiding movies of the universe in their glowing rings

I have to say, I had looked to The New Scientist to be a grounding voice of sanity during the lockdown, and initially, I found the first article unsettling to my mental health, but now I’ve got used to it, and considered that I’m not the only person bothered by the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’, I’m feeling a bit better about it. 

The story described how people like Johannes Kleiner and Sean Tull are using mathematics to unravel the problem of consciousness. If you can’t access the New Scientist article because of the paywall, here’s Sean Tull explaining his work on YouTube (IIT which he mentions is Integrated Information Theory, an idea which has been kicking around for a while now).

The second story I found easier (existentially) to mentally process, perhaps illogically.

Following the success of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration’s producing the first direct image of a black hole, in 2019 and an eclectic group of scientists got together to try to understand what the image meant. They found that ‘the black hole’s gravity takes light from all directions, warps it and beams it to us as an infinitely recast image of the hole’s surroundings. The result is an epic movie of the history of the universe, as witnessed by a black hole, playing on a dramatically curved screen tens of billions of kilometres across.’ Well wow. Michael Johnson is one of the people behind this work. His details here.