Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist Danny Jin warms up on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025, before a concert. Jin will be among a small group of players performing Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time in response to this prompt: What does music sound like in a time of crisis?

Thomas “Tom” Mapp, a transformative leader in arts education and administration at the University of Chicago, passed away on Nov. 11, 2024. He was 88.

Iconic Doomsday Clock moves one second closer to midnight as global existential threats rage. Clock factors include nuclear weapons, climate crisis, artificial intelligence, infectious diseases, and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

What is the Doomsday Clock? It's 2025 and scientists have reset the clock closer to midnight and global catastrophe. Here's what it all means.

The “Doomsday Clock”, which signals the end of humanity when it hits midnight, is only 89 seconds from the milestone. That is the closest it has ever been. It has been 90 seconds away for the previous two years.

President Donald Trump ordered the construction of a new missile defense system covering the United States, the latest move in a years-long drive spanning multiple administrations to massively expand US nuclear capabilities.

Seventy-eight years ago, scientists created a unique sort of timepiece — named the Doomsday Clock — as a symbolic attempt to gauge how close humanity is to destroying the world.

The Doomsday Clock, a concept designed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to represent humanity’s proximity to a global catastrophe, was updated on Tuesday.

"The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness," the Bulletin said. "The United States, China, and Russia have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink. The world depends on immediate action."

In a statement about the 2025 Doomsday Clock, the organization explained the dire circumstances that went into the decision. “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe.

Many hope it will answer a question that has long divided Americans and the country’s understanding of its history: Who exactly was J. Robert Oppenheimer ... just as the university moved ...

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was an American theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and therefore responsible for the research and design of the atomic bomb. He is often known as the ...