As for yours truly; I'm trying to do "ten year projects" as part of my "second life" (the first is before 40, the second is after).
Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME / Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...
How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?
A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.
How the hell does the weather even work (metrology)?
This is because of my current work project, helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.
And also... why the hell isn't everybody using FreeBSD for server workloads?