Why has no major philosopher appeared recently? Philosophy in its various forms seems to be no longer of interest except to its students. What are the reasons for this? – Wassan, Iraq Oh my, there’s quite a barrel-full of assumptions in this question, Wassan — not least the fact … | Continue reading
Have we found a new way of defining life? This scientist thinks so. Lee Cronin, the Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, proposes that Assembly Theory may hold the key to discovering how life began and evolved. His theory introduces three parameters for underst … | Continue reading
In the wake of COVID, rising populations are shifting out of states like New York and California and moving to previously less-popular landscapes. The biggest beneficiaries of the post-pandemic economy have been states in the American South, including Texas and Florida, which has … | Continue reading
Here in our Universe, we don’t have just one different kind of mass that objects can possess. Instead, there are different types of mass that arise in different contexts. If you want to accelerate a mass — i.e., to change its motion — you’re interested in its inertial mass, or th … | Continue reading
There is a hidden cause behind a fun little demonstration of an ostensibly paranormal experience that I often include in public talks on anomalistic psychology, especially when I have a reasonably large audience. I explain to my audience that an important part of proper skepticis … | Continue reading
“Hello,” Kelly Haston, commander of NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHEPEA), told the press after she and her crewmates emerged from a 378-day stay inside a habitat designed to simulate the conditions astronauts would face on a mission to the surface of Mar … | Continue reading
The investor Gavin Baker offers a smart breakdown this week of what’s at stake (and who is winning) in the race to achieve artificial superintelligence. Baker — the managing partner and CIO of Atreides Management — began covering Nvidia in 2000, Tesla since its IPO in 2010, and h … | Continue reading
When you’re a scientist, getting an unexpected result can be a double-edged sword. The best prevailing theories of the day can tell you what sort of data you ought to expect to acquire as you ask nature questions about itself, but only by confronting your predictions with real-wo … | Continue reading
In 2014, researchers at the University of Illinois created a microscopic swimming robot. This accomplishment alone might not have attracted much attention. But what set it apart was how they constructed their creation: with cardiac muscle cells derived from rats. This was one of … | Continue reading
How does one define a brand’s success? In answering that question, most people would turn to the brands, products, and ads we’re all familiar with. They’ll consider McDonald’s famed “Golden Arches,” the meteoric rise of the iPhone, and water cooler chat about Budweiser’s latest S … | Continue reading
It’s hard to believe, but it was only two years ago, in the summer of 2022, that the very first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were unveiled to the world. Although they revealed remarkable details about newly forming planets, young stellar systems, exop … | Continue reading
Give a scientist a world-class particle accelerator and they’re going to study lots of nonintuitive phenomena. In the collisions they generate, classical physics drops by the wayside and quantum mechanics rules. Matter and antimatter appear and disappear with wanton abandon. Part … | Continue reading
Establishing a sense of direction, even a specific destination, has the potential to align people with a leader and develop a shared commitment that is equally important to everyone. It is the articulation of a vision that has the potential to differentiate one leader and one org … | Continue reading
In a world where our decisions are increasingly influenced by data, understanding the information we encounter has never been more essential. Dr. Talithia Williams explains the case for data literacy. Dr. Talithia Williams, a math professor and science communicator, shares her ta … | Continue reading
In 2008, the British cycling team surprised the world and dominated their rivals at the Beijing Olympics: 14 medals in total. Eight gold. How did they achieve such a remarkable feat? It wasn’t groundbreaking technology. Nor was it an intense new training regimen. It was something … | Continue reading
If you ask someone how much they weigh, they’re likely to give you a number that they obtained from reading it off of a scale. If that person uses the metric system, they’re likely to give you a measurement in kilograms: 93 kilograms, for example. If they use the English system o … | Continue reading
Sara Walker is not messing around. From the first lines of her new book, Life As No One Knows It, she calls out some big-name public intellectuals for missing the boat on the ancient, fundamental question, “What Is Life?” Subtitled The Physics of Life’s Emergence, one of the book … | Continue reading
When asked to name a leader who stands out today, many of us struggle to find an answer. The media rarely highlights leaders who are excelling in difficult circumstances, and it’s challenging to identify role models for the next generation. The latest Edelman Trust index reveals … | Continue reading
Here in 2024, thousands of planets are known beyond Earth. What do planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, look like? A variety of possibilities are shown in this illustration. Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s. As of 2024, the tally stands at over … | Continue reading
You might not know who Dennis “Thresh” Fong is, but if you’ve ever played a video game on PC, you’ve undoubtedly used his config. Config, short for configuration, describes how a gamer sets up the controls for a specific video game on their keyboard. Today, almost every first-per … | Continue reading
There are many ways to mark someone’s age. You can tell by the lines on their face or their gray-hair count (or their no-hair count). You can watch how delicately they sit down and how loudly they groan when doing so. But one of the surest ways to tell someone’s age is to see wha … | Continue reading
A huge variety of objects, many of them completely unconnected with scientific research, have been launched into orbit—and beyond—over the past 60 years: A golf ball. Pizza. Our dead. Some of these things are sent for purely symbolic or political purposes. Others for communicatio … | Continue reading
Martin Luther King Jr. is the person most often associated with it, but Bayard Rustin, known to some as “Mr. March on Washington,” organized this landmark historical event in 1963. Rustin had many collective identities. He was black, gay, American, socialist, Quaker, pacifist, an … | Continue reading
The current political climate gives me great angst. I realize that the only way to move forward is for both sides to come together and seek some common ground. However, my morals prevent me from even considering taking the first step. I have written off close friends and even fam … | Continue reading
Before online dating became ubiquitous, most people met their partners at work, school, or through a shared network of friends. But as apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge have become the default for finding romance, an enormous shift from real life courtship to virtual has occurr … | Continue reading
One of the more puzzling and counterintuitive facts about the Universe is that what we experience as space — or the distance/separation between objects — isn’t something that’s fixed over time. Instead, distances evolve, and not in the same way, on cosmic scales, that they evolve … | Continue reading
If asked what the most important social consequences of religion are, many people would say it is that religious beliefs make us act more morally. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007 showed that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be mora … | Continue reading
“Come!” “Sit.” “Speak.” “Down.” “Shake.” “Heel!” “Roll over!” These words are well-known among dog owners. We teach them to our faithful companions so they will learn to understand rudimentary commands and do our bidding. It’s a task dogs are evolutionarily primed for. They keenl … | Continue reading
This long-form profile of the entrepreneur Palmer Luckey offers a rare glimpse into the mind of one tech’s most unconventional—and decidedly controversial—figures. It’s a story about risk, resilience, and the genius—and/or madman—fueling a growing empire. For the uninitiated, Luc … | Continue reading
Perhaps the most bizarre property we’ve discovered about the Universe is that our physical reality doesn’t seem to be governed by purely deterministic laws. Instead, at a fundamental, quantum level, the laws of physics are only probabilistic: you can compute the likelihood of the … | Continue reading
Chapter 3, Ode to Man Techno-humanism is a type of humanism. Humanism (as stated in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now) is “the goal of maximizing human flourishing—life, health, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experience.”1 Implicit in this goal is that humans de … | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered what makes you alive? What makes anything alive? At the 2012 meeting of the American Chemical Society, in a session on the origin of life, Andrew Ellington proposed a radical theory: “Life does not exist.” Andy is a chemistry professor from the University o … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever gazed up at a dark and clear night sky, you might feel the same thing that I do each and every time: a feeling that it’s beckoning us and drawing us in to explore and wonder what’s out there in the great abyss of space. Each point of distant, twinkling light isn’t … | Continue reading
Leaders don’t lack resources aimed at helping them deliver more meaningful employee feedback. Yet, candid and comprehensive feedback for leaders, particularly on leadership and management skills, receives far less attention. According to Gallup research, less than half of U.S. em … | Continue reading
Among the biggest fears attending AI’s rapid advance is mass unemployment. In 2013, the economist Carl Benedikt Frey and the machine learning professor Michael Osborne, both at the University of Oxford, published a landmark study that found almost half of all U.S. jobs were at “h … | Continue reading
On the morning of December 6, 1917, a bright, windless day, a French freighter called the Mont Blanc began to slowly pull out of the Halifax harbor in Nova Scotia. At the time, Halifax was one of the busiest ports in the British Empire. There was a war on in Europe, and the harbo … | Continue reading
One of the most difficult concepts for anyone — even a professional astrophysicist — to wrap their minds around is the idea of the Big Bang and the expanding Universe. Off in the far-flung distance, at the limit of what even our most powerful telescopes can see, are galaxies spee … | Continue reading
Construction specialists have excavated a giant cavern that’s located a mile underground. It’s currently being outfitted with the infrastructure needed to host an enormous particle detector that aims to detect the passage of an antisocial particle called a neutrino. Meanwhile, sc … | Continue reading
The universe is inflating like a cosmic balloon. Lee Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, has a new theory about why. Many scientists believe cosmic inflation is occurring as a result of the Big Bang, but Cronin has a different idea. Time, he explains, … | Continue reading
Jeremy Johnson is the CEO of the global talent network Andela, which he co-founded and built on the idea that “brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.” Investors attracted to Andela’s mission to connect remote, largely African tech expertise with leading interna … | Continue reading
According to the theory of the hot Big Bang, the Universe had a beginning. Originally known as “a day without a yesterday,” this is one of the most controversial, philosophically mind-blowing pieces of information we’ve come to accept as part of the scientific history of our Univ … | 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. Global electricity demand has skyrocketed, driven in large par … | Continue reading
If physics ruled the 20th century, the 21st is shaping up to be the century of biology. The past two decades have brought us the completion of the Human Genome Project, the advent of CRISPR technology, the development of mRNA drugs, advances in personalized medicine and stem-cell … | Continue reading
Please explain how Trump said “God Almighty” saved him; however, he did not say “God Almighty” killed the gentleman behind him. Can he have it both ways? – Armour, USA. When I first received this question and read the word “Trump,” I nearly deleted it within seconds. Big Think do … | Continue reading
In modern times, our lives have changed tremendously by gaining control over nature. The advent of vaccines, antibiotics, antivirals, and better sanitation has dramatically reduced our physiological challenges. In the present day, we enjoy a much more secure food supply than we d … | Continue reading
For as long as humans have been around, our innate curiosity has compelled us to ask questions about the universe. Why are things the way they are? How did they get to be this way? Were these outcomes inevitable or could things have turned out differently if we rewound the clock … | Continue reading
What is the world’s hottest city? I don’t mean “hot” in the figurative sense — symbolically synonymous with its actual opposite: “cool.” (That would have to be a top tourist draw like London, Dubai, or New York City.) No, I mean literally, oppressively hot. Positively broiling. L … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I read a story that Stanford biologists were studying a particular plant — the Schrenkiella parvula — that held a mysterious superpower: a rare ability to thrive in environmental conditions that would otherwise kill 99.99% of its peers. The scientists refer … | Continue reading