Why the ancient power of the Dao De Jing is more important than ever

It was the middle of the pandemic; months had passed since I last wrote a word. I had never run out of stories since the age of five. But here I was, taleless. My work was to tell stories about the future, futures brought about by the work of humans, a species that is by no means … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

5 ways to turn curiosity into long-term success

When people look at the CEO of a successful company, they only see the pinnacle of that person’s career, not the decades of growth to get there. As any successful person will tell you, it takes effort and intentionality to achieve growth in your career. Now I’m the CEO of digital … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Fastest spacecraft ever built to break its own speed record

On September 30, 2024, the Parker Solar Probe reached its 21st perihelion: its closest approach to the Sun. The science questions that are being answered by the Parker Solar Probe are fundamental to understanding the Sun, its corona, and the phenomenon of space weather. By the en … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

No, LLMs still can’t reason like humans. This simple test reveals why.

Imagine what would happen if you attempted the following experiment: First, place a washed, fresh tomato and an equally clean carrot on top of a normal kitchen plate. With one hand behind your back, flip the non-stick plate upside-down, inspecting the underside of the plate for m … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Crows are even smarter than we thought

Crows and ravens, which belong to the corvid family, are known for their high intelligence, playful natures, and strong personalities. They hold grudges against each other, do basic statistics, perform acrobatics, and even host funerals for deceased family members. But we keep le … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

The startup using balloons to cool the planet

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 above. It’s 2050, and for the first time in 100 years, the average global tempe … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Everyday Philosophy: I didn’t tip for a $5 cup of coffee. Was I wrong?

I recently did something for the first time: I hit “No tip” on the iPad payment system at a local coffee shop when it prompted me to add a 20% tip for a $5 coffee. Although I always tip well at restaurants, I feel tipping culture has gotten out of control over the past several ye … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Ask Ethan: Is Earth the center of the Universe?

There are some remarkable and surprising facts about the Universe, but three of them, put together, force us into a profound set of restrictions on existence itself. The Universe, on the largest scales, appears to be isotropic, or the same in all directions. No matter how far awa … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Study reveals the benefits and downside of fasting

Low-calorie diets and intermittent fasting have been shown to have numerous health benefits: They can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan, not only in humans but many other organisms. Many complex mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. Previous work f … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

World’s largest solar project will send Australian energy to Singapore

In August, Australia’s environment minister Tanya Plibersek approved the construction of the Australia-Asia Power Link. The $30-billion project, AAPowerLink for short, has the scale and ambition to redraw the world’s sustainable energy map. Three stand-out superlatives Several su … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

The trillion-dollar answer to AI’s biggest question

In June, Sequoia Capital published an essay proclaiming the AI bubble is “reaching a tipping point.” The essay went viral, in part, because it asked a rather pointed and timely question: with hundreds of billions of dollars spent on AI, where is all the revenue going to come from … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Your head lives a longer life than your feet do

There’s no such thing as absolute time. No matter where you are, how fast you’re moving, or how strong the gravitational field is around you, any clock you have on you will always record time as passing at the same rate: one second per second. For any solitary observer, time simp … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

“Wonderbringers”: How to dissolve work-life stress with awe

For our money, the world’s best workplace isn’t found anywhere in the world. It’s orbiting roughly 250 miles above it: the International Space Station (ISS). For more than two decades, astronauts have worked aboard the ISS to maintain the station and conduct cutting-edge scientif … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

How suicide warped David Foster Wallace’s legacy

On the evening of September 6, 2008, David Foster Wallace convinced his wife Karen Green to go to the mall without him. Green was hesitant to leave her husband alone, as he had been struggling with his mental health for some time. Still, the fact that he had recently gone to the … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Why hasn’t JWST broken the cosmic distance record by more?

Back in mid-2022, there was a dispute over the cosmic distance record. Back in 2016, a galaxy identified from within the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, GN-z11, set a definitive record: it came to us from when the Universe was just 407 million years old, or only ~3% of its present age. … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Tinder Swindler: How “romance fraud” became a multi-billion dollar cybercrime

“I met him in person. [He] looked like his pictures. Really charming. Really opening up to me. So we had a coffee. He was talking about his job. He was the CEO of a big diamond company. On the first day I met him, we travelled on this private jet. I fell quickly and I fell hard…” … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

How “Restoration Networking” can shape our work-life transformation

I’m a capitalist and a fervent believer in its fundamental economic premises. We have freedom to imagine, invent, and improve, to delight and serve people by providing a product or service that enhances their lives, honorably, with trust and respect. This is the elixir that drive … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

3 subtle traits of successful late bloomers

Katharine Graham became the CEO of the Washington Post Company – a major publishing business that owned radio and television stations, as well as Newsweek and the Washington Post – one summer afternoon in 1962, at the age of forty-five, when her husband shot himself. She had no i … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

5 ways for leaders to evolve with the modern workforce

The American workforce has changed dramatically in the past few years. From workplace attitudes to demographics, the values and makeup of today’s employees present a whole new set of challenges (and opportunities) for today’s leaders. Just a few examples: Gen Z is poised to outnu … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Play it again: The causal link between fun and resilience

In 1965, Yvon Chouinard wasn’t building a company. He was simply crafting climbing gear as a passion project. It was something that would enable him to stay connected to the outdoors — and avoid a 9-to-5 corporate gig. In the early days, Chouinard sold pitons out of the trunk of … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Shortest-lived quantum particles exhibit quantum entanglement, too

Of all the spooky quantum phenomena in our Universe, perhaps the spookiest of them all remains quantum entanglement. The basic idea behind it is that particles don’t just exhibit this weird sort of indeterminism — where they propagate as waves, in indeterminate states, but intera … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 2 months ago

Decoding the brain’s dictionary: Scientists map how neurons encode word meanings

Language has interested brain investigators for centuries. In the 1860s, Pierre Paul Broca’s post-mortem examinations of stroke patients with language deficits identified an area of the left frontal lobe involved in speech production. At around the same time, Karl Wernicke identi … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

The man that found purpose after losing his sight

John Furniss, most commonly known as The Blind Woodsman, has carved a remarkable path that proves vision extends far beyond eyesight. From a troubled youth grappling with blindness and addiction to a skilled artisan who finds purpose and beauty in the craft of woodworking, Furnis … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

“Humanity strikes back”: The 5th industrial revolution

Mike Bechtel is in the business of “helping today’s leaders arrive at their preferred tomorrows slightly ahead of schedule” — an elegant translation of his official job title: chief futurist with Deloitte Consulting LLP. A prior career path from inventor (12 patents over as many … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

JWST shows a new side of planet formation

All across the Milky Way, new stars continuously form. This region of space shows a portion of the plane of the Milky Way, with three extended star-forming regions all side-by-side next to one another. The Omega Nebula (left), the Eagle Nebula (center), and Sharpless 2-54 (right) … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

The rise of the semi-autonomous car

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 above. It’s 2030, and you just drove your new car home from the lot. Well, tech … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

How we solved the hole in the ozone

The most striking thing was the solitude. As the airplane thundered across an unsettled sky toward Antarctica, I stared out the window at the landscape of shifting ice floes and dark ocean. There were no roads, no settlements, no structures of any kind—not even the occasional lon … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

The future of fertility, from artificial wombs to AI-assisted IVF

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 above. It’s 2026, and you just had your first child through IVF. You would’ve t … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Everyday Philosophy: 3 rules for discussing controversial topics

In today’s political climate, how do we do that? How can we come together and seek some common ground or understanding? What are the mechanics of doing that? Is there some script or set of ground rules? Well, this is a different kind of question demanding a different kind of answ … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Use the “Johari Window Model” to improve your conversations

I’m not a DIY kind of person. Growing up, I gravitated to books more than making things. When presented with an IKEA instruction manual, I clam up. I bash, screw, and twist things in the hope that they will stay up. Occasionally, a carpenter or builder will come to our house. The … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Ask Ethan: Does space require dark energy in order to exist?

Here in our Universe, one of the few things we can be certain of is that every signal we’ve ever observed has originated within the fabric of spacetime itself. Galaxies, stars, planets, atoms, particles and antiparticles, photons, gravitational waves, and more all exist within, a … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Scientists find neurons that process language on different timescales

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscientists have identified several regions of the brain that are responsible for processing language. However, discovering the specific functions of neurons in those regions has proven difficult because fMRI, which measures … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

CERN experiment unlocks new insights into the W boson

Building new physics facilities tends to advance our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature. They create new capabilities and open unexplored horizons. But this is not the only way scientists can explore the unknown. Another is to make very precise measurements and compa … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Big tech fails transparency test: Gary Marcus on what we should demand of AI

Transparency — being clear about what you’ve done and what the impact is. It sounds wonky, but matters enormously. Companies like Microsoft often give lip service to “transparency,” but provide precious little actual transparency into how their systems work, how they are trained, … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

The essential skill to master across life and business

The most valuable commodity in today’s market is not oil or gold or even Dogecoin. It’s people’s attention. If you’re reading this right now, research says I’ve got about 8 seconds to capture your attention. How am I doing? The explosion of content across the Internet has launche … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Hidden variable alternative to quantum spookiness fails

For all of history, there’s been an underlying but unspoken assumption about the laws that govern the Universe: that if you know enough information about a system, like the positions, momenta, and properties of the particles within it, then you can use that information to predict … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Sara Imari Walker: Using physics to rethink the defintion of life

Sara Imari Walker is a professor of physics at Arizona State University and the author of a new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. As I wrote in my review of the book, I’m a big fan of Walker’s work (full disclosure, we have collaborated before on a pa … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Sara Imari Walker: Using physics to rethink the definition of life

Sara Imari Walker is a professor of physics at Arizona State University and the author of a new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. As I wrote in my review of the book, I’m a big fan of Walker’s work (full disclosure, we have collaborated before on a pa … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Longest, strongest black hole jets of all-time discovered

How much of an influence can one single object in the Universe have? Until recently, we didn’t think it was all that much. Sure, individual objects can emit lots of things: photons of all wavelengths, neutrinos and antineutrinos of enormous energies, gravitational waves, and jets … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Happy? Take “psychological ownership” of your job

There’s a lot riding on engaging emotionally with our jobs. Studies show that when organizations increase the number of engaged employees, they improve a whole host of outcomes including profitability, wellbeing, productivity, and customer loyalty. Yet, despite 70 per cent of emp … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

The dirt on biocrusts: Why scientists are working to save Earth’s living skin

Under the dry, piercing heat of the Utah sun, Sasha Reed is growing plots of plants — and bacteria, lichen and fungi, too. But Reed is no farmer, and at first glance, her fields look to be mostly dirt. She’s an ecologist, and what she is growing is cryptobiotic soil. Also called … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

How Innovation Clusters Generate Endless Great Ideas

Every culture has the archetype of the hermitic genius. The lone scholar who isolates themselves from worldly concerns to focus on their studies, inventions, and arcane tomes. While there are plenty of examples of great minds who did their best work alone, modern innovation tends … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Richard Dawkins on reverse engineering evolution’s optimal beauty

Engineers assume that a mechanism designed by somebody for a purpose will betray that purpose by its nature. We can then “reverse engineer” it to discern the purpose that the designer had in mind. Reverse engineering is the method by which scientific archaeologists reconstructed … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Why hardwired “power laws” hold the secret to better work

Stone Age Economics, written by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, is a rich anthology of firsthand accounts of hunter-gatherer community life from different corners of the world. The accounts paint a rhythmic pattern of work and rest such that people would work hard for p … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

Why we’ll never shoot Earth’s garbage into the Sun

For billions of years on planet Earth, the greatest threats to any and all forms of biological activity came from predators, competitors, and the hazards of our natural environment. If you encountered an organism that wanted to fight, kill, or eat you, you had to figure out how t … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

How Greek surnames reveal their geographic origins

Michael Dukakis could have been the first Greek-American president. But in November 1988, the then-governor of Massachusetts lost the election to George Bush Sr. Perhaps the U.S. wasn’t ready yet for a commander in chief with an exotic surname and non-European heritage (Dukakis’ … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

What JWST found in the extreme outer Milky Way

Bright stars and dust lanes dominate our everyday views of galaxies. This rotating spiral galaxy, NGC 1512, is located only 30 million light-years away, and is highlighted by a core of old stars, a central ring of hot, star-forming material, and then wispy, thin spiral arms conne … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago

T-Minus: 10 space stations of the future

This is T-Minus, where Freethink’s Kristin Houser counts down the biggest developments in space, from new rocket launches to discoveries that advance our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Space stations of the future For more than 20 years, the International Spac … | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 3 months ago