The AI doomers have been particularly active these last several months, ramping up their descriptions of all the bad things that are going to happen any moment and all the disasters that will emerge for sure in the next decade. I have been mostly heads down on deadline writing a … | Continue reading
David Reich is a geneticist at Harvard whose lab helped pioneer the field of ancient DNA — extracting and sequencing genetic material from human remains thousands of years old. What they found overturned nearly everything scientists thought they knew about where we come from. Bef … | Continue reading
Time feels like the most obvious, standard metric in our world – until you ask a physicist like Sean Carroll about it. Underneath our widely accepted perceptions of linearity lies a much more interesting and complex world. Beneath these assumptions lies the most complex, unsolve … | Continue reading
In science, no matter how confident we are in our theories, there’s no substitute for interrogating the natural world by asking it questions about itself directly: through observation and experiment. Sometimes, that requires setting up conditions in a laboratory to create certain … | Continue reading
In 2013, the renowned educationalist Sir Ken Robinson told Big Think a story about a man who was perhaps the unluckiest farmer in Australia. For generations, the man’s family had farmed the same land, scratching out a living from soil that gave just enough back. Then the rains fa … | Continue reading
“The bittersweet memory of that day, eighteen years ago, had never left him. It was the second time he had been sold in his short lifetime, reduced to nothing more than a name and number scratched on a wax tablet, and still no one came to save him. He sometimes saw Poppaea in the … | Continue reading
From space, the boreal forest appears as a near-continuous pine-green band stretching across the Northern Hemisphere, just beneath the Arctic — from Europe through Russia and Asia, and again across Alaska and Canada. Up close, the forest resolves into a patchwork of species. Coni … | Continue reading
From space, the boreal forest appears as a near-continuous pine-green band stretching across the Northern Hemisphere, just beneath the Arctic — from Europe through Russia and Asia, and again across Alaska and Canada. Up close, the forest resolves into a patchwork of species. Coni … | Continue reading
In 1675, Newton famously wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Behind the dome of a series of European Southern Observatory telescopes, the Milky Way towers in the southern skies, flanked by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, at righ … | Continue reading
We often think about the Solar System as being our own cosmic backyard, and in many ways, it is: these are the closest objects to us in all the Universe, and our only opportunity to study lunar and planetary systems in situ. However, when it comes to the objects beyond Saturn, in … | Continue reading
“We are what we repeatedly do.” Aristotle said it first, and a century of scientific research has confirmed it: The patterns of our lives — good and bad — are carved by our habits. But there’s something we tend to miss. We instinctively think of habits as tools for individual imp … | Continue reading
One of the world’s most cooperative mammals is also one of its most warlike. I’m not talking about us. The banded mongoose lives in sub-Saharan Africa. It has a long, bulky body and a pointed face, kind of like a ferret on steroids. There are many species of mongoose, but this on … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, there are enormous variations in the densities of what we commonly encounter. Solid, dense metals, like gold or tungsten, have very high densities. If you had a cube that was one meter (3 feet and 3.39 inches) on a side — a cubic meter — made of gold, it would weig … | Continue reading
Most productivity advice costs more time than it returns. The fix isn’t a better system. It’s understanding why some goals feel effortless and others feel like homework, and learning to close that distance. Author Chris Bailey breaks down the “intention stack” and the underrated … | Continue reading
On the morning of May 23, 1925, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the small hot spring town of Kinosaki, near the coast of the Sea of Japan. The timing was catastrophic. It was late morning, and nearly every household in the village was cooking lunch over an open flame. Within mi … | Continue reading
Komodo dragons were nearly mythical creatures until the first detailed field study was conducted by Walter Auffenberg in the late 1960s. Their dinosaurian appearance combined with the remoteness of their natural habitat made them a dream species for hardcore wildlife enthusiasts, … | Continue reading
What is hope, and where does it come from? Lisa Miller, PhD, Sam Newlands, PhD, and William Magee, PhD bring together neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to explore how hope operates between certainty and impossibility, how spiritual life protects the brain against depressio … | Continue reading
All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some of them, like sound waves, require a medium to travel through: the waves are fundamentally disturbances in a medium of particles, and in the absence of those particles, an initial “disturbance” has nowhere to … | Continue reading
You’re sitting at your desk, two hours into the working day, and you get the urge. You suddenly feel deeply unhappy about staying still. You want to get up and go for a walk. You want to talk to a colleague. Anything to get away from this static, boxed-in workstation. For two hou … | Continue reading
There are a few things in this cosmos that are truly universal. The fundamental laws that govern reality apply everywhere and at all times. The fundamental constants that determine the masses, charges, and interaction strengths between particles are universal as well. Today, ther … | Continue reading
“Life is inherently difficult,” wrote the English psychiatrist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, and “it follows that in everyone there will be symptoms, any one of which, under certain conditions, could be a symptom of illness. Even the most kindly, understanding background of … | Continue reading
What looked like a simple story of migration turned into a record of repeated mixing, vanished populations, and scientific shocks—including the discovery that many people outside Africa carry Neanderthal DNA, and that a little girl’s pinky bone once exposed an entirely unknown hu … | Continue reading
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union — the global governing body for many official astronomical endeavors, including naming and classification — took a step that had never been taken before: they officially defined the term “planet.” This contentious move, which occurred … | Continue reading
Sunday evening. I’m staring at my to-do list for the week ahead, and that familiar weight settles into my chest. There’s the newsletter draft I need to finish. The client presentation to revise. Three strategy documents waiting for review. Dozens of unread emails. My first though … | Continue reading
4:47 p.m. Slack notification. “Hey, the client wants to see the deck reformatted first thing tomorrow morning. Can you turn this around before you log off?“ You had dinner plans that you’ll now have to skip, but that’s not really the problem. You agreed to work hard when you took … | Continue reading
In July, the European Union’s rotating Council Presidency will issue official communications in the Irish language, alongside English, in a historic first. Government ministers from Ireland, which chairs the Council for the second half of this year, will be encouraged to say at l … | Continue reading
You’ve probably noticed the data center drag race unfolding before our eyes. From smaller regional operators to giants like xAI and Meta, key players vie for the right real estate: enough land for massive facilities, proximity to supply chains and infrastructure, and — perhaps mo … | Continue reading
Across the recesses of space, collimated jets frequently emerge. While distant host galaxies for quasars and active galactic nuclei can often be imaged in visible/infrared light, the jets themselves and the surrounding emission is best viewed in both the X-ray and the radio, a … | Continue reading
I want to tell you two stories. The first began in 1921, when a traveling salesman named William Barnard, nicknamed “Papa,” walked door to door in Ohio selling a 25-cent can opener. He called it the Polly. He believed, earnestly, that a better can opener could improve the health … | Continue reading
Our spaces broadcast who we are and what we care about — whether we realize it or not. A warm kitchen built around a big table signals a family that values shared meals. An elementary school with an elaborate playground tells parents that outdoor exploration matters here. A walka … | Continue reading
When it comes to the distant galaxies in the Universe, one of the most profound discoveries in all of history is also one of the most puzzling: the fact that they’re almost all mutually receding from one another. It was only in 1923 that we firmly established that extragalactic o … | Continue reading
Music is at least a million years older than language, yet we still see it solely through the lens of entertainment. Professor Michael Spitzer argues it’s something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feelin … | Continue reading
Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wi … | Continue reading
From 1929 until 2006, Pluto lived in the imagination of children and adults alike as the ninth and outermost planet in our solar system. Until 1978, with the discovery of its giant moon, Charon, it was the only known large object in our solar system that orbited beyond the reach … | Continue reading
Three years into a consulting career that looked successful on paper, I was staring out a plane window at nothing in particular, asking, What is this actually for? Alabama on Tuesday. Ohio on Thursday. Good firm with good people to work with, meaningful and intellectually stimula … | Continue reading
Many of world literature’s most unlikable protagonists start unlikeable and end unlikeable. From the very beginning of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is clear that the titular Gray is a narcissist who’ll do anything to inflate his already monstrous ego. The same goe … | Continue reading
Europeans and North Americans are WEIRD. No, I’m not trying to start a culture war. I’m just quoting behavioural scientists. A little over a decade ago, they began to realize that most psychological studies did not paint an accurate picture of the global population. More often th … | Continue reading
What you actually care about shows up in your calendar and your bank statement, not your intentions. Mark Manson walks through the Stoic practice of Memento Mori, his own “law of avoidance,” explaining why people sabotage good relationships as readily as bad ones, and why generat … | Continue reading
At any given moment, individuals around the world are working in every conceivable context. For some, it’s energizing–a place where people work to make the world a better place. For others, it’s just a job, and while it pays the bills, it’s a benign experience they could take or … | Continue reading
20 years ago, the story of our Universe took an unexpected turn, when dark matter’s existence was confirmed empirically within the natural lab of the Universe: through the science of colliding galaxy clusters. Previously, we could only look at physical systems — individual galaxi … | Continue reading
Harvard geneticist David Reich has spent years extracting DNA from ancient human remains. What the data shows keeps defying every assumption scientists had built. Every population ever studied is profoundly mixed. Britain alone has been almost completely replaced four or five tim … | Continue reading
Mark Manson argues that modern life has confused comfort and stimulation for genuine fulfillment, and that the ancient Greek distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia might be the most important psychological concept nobody talks about anymore. This video The most important ques … | Continue reading
Here in 2026, something remarkable has happened: humanity, for the first time since the Apollo era, has returned to the Moon. Despite all of our technological, computational, materials science, rocketry, and manufacturing advances that had occurred since 1972, no human had left t … | Continue reading
Today’s Standard Model describes our Universe’s particles and forces. Although there are many similarities and differences within the Standard Model: between quarks and leptons, between fermions and bosons, between particles and antiparticles, etc., displaying the Standard Mod … | Continue reading
Anytime you try and learn something beyond your current understanding, it isn’t as simple as pouring “new knowledge” into an otherwise empty vessel. We come into any new endeavor with a pre-existing foundation: things we’ve learned, been taught, or have put together for ourselves … | Continue reading
Dr. Nicole LePera, the holistic psychologist and NYT bestselling author behind Reparenting the Inner Child, breaks down the 6 archetypes of childhood trauma. LePera explains why insight alone never produces lasting change and walks through the science of reparenting: The practice … | Continue reading
It’s often said that history is written by the winners. But when you look back on the ancient world, it’s more accurate to say that history is written by historians. Although China has a strong claim, many tend to cite ancient Greece as the birthplace of history as a discipline. … | Continue reading
“What can be very frustrating is that regulation is often irrational,” Musk told an audience at Stanford in 2003. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He arrived at the following solution: He would be the one to decide what made sense. And he would not be shy about exercising this author … | Continue reading