Abstract: In the past decade, we’ve learned that the sky is buzzing with fast radio bursts (FRBs) that last for mere milliseconds and originate from galaxies at millions to billions of parsecs. These remarkable bursts are trillions of times more luminous than Galactic pulsars, and yet the phenomenon is not rare. The wide-field CHIME radio telescope is discovering several FRB sources per day, and upcoming facilities like CHORD will discover tens of FRBs per day. We aim to understand the astrophysical origins of these enigmatic bursts and to use them as unique probes of the magneto-ionised media between stars and galaxies. While the ultra-magnetic neutron stars known as “magnetars” are likely responsible for at least some of the FRBs we see, the diversity of FRB environments and signal properties suggests that the observed phenomenon has multiple astrophysical origins. If so, that makes the astrophysical puzzle even deeper and richer. In this talk, I will present our state-of-the-art understanding of FRBs and their applications as astrophysical and cosmological probes. I will also show that we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we can find: there is likely an even larger population of coherent radio transients that we are on the verge of discovering with our increasingly powerful radio telescopes.