This is T-Minus, where Freethink’s Kristin Houser breaks down the biggest developments in space, from new rocket launches to discoveries that advance our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Humanity is reaching new heights in space exploration. Make sure you’re par … | Continue reading
Video calling services like Zoom and FaceTime have created a brand-new set of experiences, from virtual visits with grandkids to getting caught half-dressed on a roommate’s work call. As communications scholar Hannah Spaulding writes, all this was foretold back in the 1960s, when … | Continue reading
On the largest of cosmic scales, the best description we have of our Universe is known as the ΛCDM model with an inflationary hot Big Bang: our consensus cosmology. It tells us that we have a Universe consistent with being made of about 5% normal matter, a little bit of radiation … | Continue reading
This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing here. It’s 2035. After decades of investment, the US military now has AI system … | Continue reading
As a tall Greek man in his mid-twenties, Timmy Karter stands out from most of the migrants risking their lives to cross the Darién Gap, a 100-mile-long, 30-mile-wide undeveloped jungle separating Colombia and Panama. Unlike the migrants, Karter isn’t there in the hope of one day … | Continue reading
If you go to the zoo, you will find a dizzying variety of animals — some familiar and some completely strange. The same is true of researchers trying to study matter’s smallest components. While the proton, neutron, and electron are familiar, the subatomic zoo is inhabited by man … | Continue reading
In his book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, neuroscientist David Eagleman imagines various science-fiction-grade ways the great beyond could play out. In one version, Eagleman tells us that our afterlives are spent as background characters in someone else’s dream. Like act … | Continue reading
Thanks to modern-day social media, it’s easier than ever to connect with the people you care about. But is this really the case? Professor Arthur Brooks discusses how social media is actually harming our ability to socialize, and proposes a way to fix it. Oxytocin, the bonding ne … | Continue reading
One of the most remarkable revelations in our understanding of the cosmos is the fact that the Universe is expanding. Distant galaxies, on average, all appear to recede from us, with faster and faster recession speeds for galaxies that exist at greater distances. While individual … | Continue reading
It’s pretty easy to see that a rock and a chipmunk are different. The rock doesn’t do much of anything except erode slowly. The chipmunk, on the other hand, is a flurry of activity. It endlessly scans its environment in search of food or danger. And when either one shows up, the … | Continue reading
This Thursday, July 4, 2024, is remarkable for a number of reasons. It happens to be just one day before aphelion: the day where the Earth is at its most distant from the Sun as it revolves through the Solar System in its elliptical orbit. It’s the 248th anniversary of when the U … | Continue reading
In popular culture, ancient Sparta is known mostly for its fearsome warriors. It’s also widely recognized as perhaps the best ancient Greek society to be a woman, since female citizens were more educated and had greater autonomy than their counterparts in other city-states. Class … | Continue reading
When was the last time you felt truly removed from the trials and tribulations of your day-to-day life? If I asked a few decades ago, you might have given a couple of different answers. Perhaps you’d have mentioned your last holiday. Or a time you escaped to the beach or countrys … | Continue reading
When you look to the glittering points of light in the night sky — the stars visible to the naked eye — do you wonder, as so many have before you, about the planets that orbit around them, and what types of conditions they have on them? How many worlds do they have, and are they … | Continue reading
We humans are terrible at quickly analyzing complex datasets. There is one notable exception: We have the innate ability to immediately “read” a face. We can recognize them (“Is this my friend’s face?”) and evaluate them (“Is this a friendly face?”). We’re so good at this that we … | Continue reading
Science fiction transcends mere entertainment. This genre reveals, predicts, warns, educates, and inspires unlike anything else. Many of its best stories are infused with just enough credibility and possibility to spark serious thinking on real issues. A thoughtful survey of grea … | Continue reading
Artificial Intelligence has made remarkable strides in recent years, shaking up many sectors, particularly creative industries. These AI systems, powered by deep learning on vast datasets, have demonstrated increasingly general and flexible capabilities. However, they still prima … | Continue reading
From the 10 biblical commandments to the first 10 amendments of the US constitution, which comprise the Bill of Rights, there are many lists of governing rules that apply to our individual lives as members of civilized society. Yet for scientists, there are many other “best pract … | Continue reading
A hammerhead shark less than one meter long swims frantically in a plastic container aboard a boat in the Sanquianga National Natural Park, off Colombia’s Pacific coast. It is a delicate female Sphyrna corona, the world’s smallest hammerhead species, and goes by the local name co … | Continue reading
Lots of living things are asleep most of the time. That’s one lesson to be drawn from a recent publication by Karla Helena-Buena of Newcastle University, who discovered a new natural protein called Balon, ubiquitous in bacteria, that helps them overcome environmental stresses by … | Continue reading
Two decades ago Lord Norman Foster, one of Britain’s great architects, said that an architect designs for the present, with an awareness of the past, for an essentially unknown future. These days, architects are venturing deeper into the unknown as AI tools such as Dall-E and Mid … | Continue reading
How does one become truly happy? Arthur Brooks, author and Harvard professor, explains. Throughout his career, Brooks has pinpointed the essence of real happiness. His key insight? Happiness is not just a feeling, it’s a state of mind. In this interview, Brooks shares three prima … | Continue reading
Being thrust into the spotlight is tough to deal with as an adult – but it’s even tougher for a child who is still trying to understand their place in the world. That was reality for Carrie Berk, who co-authored a series of children’s books alongside her mother in 2012 when she w … | Continue reading
Some 6500 light-years away, an epic race nears its end. This ground-based, wide-field image of the Eagle Nebula shows the star-forming region in all its glory, with new stars, the blue glow of reflected starlight, and the red glow of ionized all present. Dusty, light-blocking fea … | Continue reading
This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing here. It’s 2030. You wake up, and instead of reaching for your phone, you pop o … | Continue reading
Most of our progress in disease treatment and prevention to date has been the product of the linear process of hit-or-miss efforts to find useful interventions. Because we have lacked tools for systematically exploring all possible treatments, discoveries under this paradigm have … | Continue reading
You may have heard that learning another language is one method for preventing or at least postponing the onset of dementia. Dementia refers to the loss of cognitive abilities, and one of its most common forms is Alzheimer’s disease. At this time, the causes of the disease are no … | Continue reading
I have conflicting thoughts about letting go of the past and repressing negative feelings. Does documenting our bad experiences in personal writing, a diary, or poetry actually help us in the long run? – Dee, US Immanuel Kant had a manservant named Martin Lampe, whom he cared dee … | Continue reading
Take a moment to appreciate sitting down. Find a good place and take a seat. Make sure your head and spine are straight but not stiff. Gently tuck your chin in. Shift your pelvis so you’re not slouching forward, but keep your chest from sticking out. Have you done it? It might fe … | Continue reading
According to leading mineralogist Bob Hazen, minerals may hold the key for discovering if we actually are alone in the universe. He highlights how Earth’s dramatic increase in mineral diversity—from 2000 to over 6000 types—aligned with the emergence of life, which drastically alt … | Continue reading
How does your entire life change when you decide, one morning, to hit the snooze button? How did one vacation to a Japanese city prevent it from a national attack? “We control nothing but influence everything.” Political scientist Brian Klaas describes how every decision we make … | Continue reading
If you take a look outside these days, if you live where most of Earth’s humans do — in the northern hemisphere — you’re likely to see something completely expected: how bright it is compared to six months ago, in the dead of Winter. It’s not just that the days are longer and the … | Continue reading
On New Year’s Day of 2023, Sal Kahn and his 11-year-old daughter Diya sat down to write a short story with ChatGPT. Diya came up with the premise and the protagonist: an influencer, named Samantha, stranded on a remote island. ChatGPT, assuming the role of Samantha, started telli … | Continue reading
Despite some sketchy early theories, an ongoing replication crisis, and even questions over its relevance, psychology has made major progress in understanding the inner workings of the mind and human behavior. Thanks to psychologists, we’ve learned that memory is not an accurate … | Continue reading
Most of us, in our day to day lives, experience time as something that’s fixed: always ticking by, in the forward direction, at an easily measurable rate that all observers can agree on. But when two observers compare what they each experience, for themselves, as one second, they … | Continue reading
Grief is a bodily experience. When I gave my mother’s eulogy at her memorial a few months after she died, I found it as hard to control my shaking hand as to deliver the words I’d written. Jema Gail Delistraty … age 55 … born in Brookfield, Illinois …. As I read, I tried to breat … | Continue reading
It’s easy to say that the rise of generative AI is having a huge impact on the business world. But how accurate is that assertion in reality, if we search beyond high-profile case studies and tech industry hype? One useful place to look for a deeper level of insight is the Stanfo … | Continue reading
The concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) can be traced back to ancient philosophies, but it was Goleman’s bestseller ‘Emotional Intelligence’ that popularized the term in 1995. According to Goleman, while IQ and smarts can get you good grades and jumpstart your career, it’s EQ … | Continue reading
Long ago, something odd must have happened way back when the Moon first formed. We aren’t sure exactly what it was or how it happened, but the aftermath of those events led to a tremendous set of differences between the Moon’s near side — the side that always faces us — and the f … | Continue reading
Saturn has 146 confirmed moons—more than any other planet in the solar system—but one called Enceladus stands out. It appears to have the ingredients for life. From 2004 to 2017, Cassini—a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency—investig … | Continue reading
When you hear the term quantum mechanics, you no doubt think about some weird and counterintuitive stuff — things like electrons being both particles and waves or cats being simultaneously dead and alive. However, despite the almost-unbelievable subatomic spookiness, our modern s … | Continue reading
Consider the image that appears in your bathroom mirror every morning. The body in the mirror is not a second body taking up space in the world with you. It is not a copy of your body. It is not even a pale imitation of your body. The mirror-body is not a body at all. A mirror pr … | Continue reading
So, you want to find the most distant objects that are out there in the Universe? So do astronomers and astrophysicists of all varieties. Only by looking to greater and greater distances — corresponding to epochs in the Universe that are closer back in time to the hot Big Bang — … | Continue reading
You may be familiar with the “arrow of time,” but did you know there could be a second one? Dr. Robert Hazen, staff scientist at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of Carnegie Science in Washington, DC, thinks that a single arrow of time may be too limiting. A second arrow, which h … | Continue reading
Here are four things about hurricanes that you may not know. One: They’re the local name of a global phenomenon. Large tropical storms in the western part of the Pacific Ocean are called typhoons. In the Indian Ocean, they’re called cyclones. In the North Atlantic or the eastern … | Continue reading
From the early days of my career, I’ve been driven by a passion for innovation and a desire to make a meaningful impact. My journey began with a deep dive into the world of entrepreneurship during university, where I honed my skills and cultivated a mindset geared towards problem … | Continue reading
Our star and galaxy-rich Universe wasn’t always this way. This comparison image, showing the same region as imaged by Hubble’s eXtreme Deep Field (top) and JWST’s JADES survey (bottom) showcases a selection of many ultra-distant galaxies found in the young Universe. When we obser … | Continue reading
The same day that President Joe Biden signed a new federal law designed to ban the popular social media platform TikTok from use in the United States, TikToK CEO Shou Zi Chew took to the platform with words of defiance. “Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” he declared. “The … | Continue reading