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
One of the most enduring ideas in all the Universe is that everything that exists now will someday see its existence come to an end. The stars, galaxies, and even the black holes that occupy the space in our Universe will all some day burn out, fade away, and otherwise decay, lea … | Continue reading
Is generative AI the viral sensation we’ve been promised? Headlines are selling it as a panacea, but 30-year AI industry vet Eric Siegel says that’s mostly hype. It may be impressive and introduce efficiencies, but it won’t run the world as we’ve been promised. Predictive AI, Sie … | Continue reading
Imagine you’re listening to a renowned academic give a presentation on … something. But after an hour-long onslaught of textbook terms, obscure jargon, and soggy statements, you have the vague sense that nothing meaningful was actually said. Then there’s this one: You’re chatting … | Continue reading
One of the most puzzling facts about our Universe is that even though we have many different methods of measuring how fast the space between galaxies expands, two broad classes of measurements disagree significantly. One of them, known as “distance ladder” measurements, starts by … | Continue reading
One of the more unexpected consequences of Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union following a 2016 referendum, is that it has made EU membership more popular. The British exit from the EU was the high-water mark of a general distrust, even disgust, expe … | Continue reading
After examining radar images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010, Leonardo Carrer and his team found that a deep pit discovered 15 years ago in the Sea of Tranquility — the same region of the Moon where the Apollo 11 astronauts landed — appears to lead to a subsurfa … | Continue reading
In the wee hours of the night, two young men are writing code, their faces pale in the blue light of the room. They haven’t taken a break in hours. One of them—his sandy brown hair disheveled, his oversized glasses flecked with grease—pours Tang from the jar directly into his pal … | Continue reading
In the early 1950s, Kutol faced a severe crisis. The market for its primary product, a wallpaper cleaner, was collapsing. Beginning in 1940 and accelerating into the early 1950s, natural gas was replacing coal as the primary heating source for homes. This resulted in cleaner air … | Continue reading
When most people think of the term relativity, the first person who comes to mind is Albert Einstein. Indeed, Einstein’s two theories of relativity — the special theory of relativity, put forth in 1905, and the general theory of relativity, put forth a decade later in 1915 — repr … | Continue reading
Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) have discovered a new way to treat anxiety. By manipulating a specific signaling pathway in the brains of young, stressed mice, they effectively halted the animals’ anxious behaviors. The advance c … | Continue reading
There are some people who just know when they’re going to die. I don’t know how they know, but they know. There are others who even seem to choose when they’ll die. Of course, not everyone appears to have control over their time of death, but when they do, I often see one of thre … | Continue reading
What does it mean to be healthy? Is it to walk at least 10,000 steps a day, get eight hours of sleep, and drink lots of water – or could simply meeting up with friends be the medicine you need? It’s commonly known how important exercise is to our physical and mental health, but r … | Continue reading
Can the power of community transform our educational systems for the better? This neuroscientist says absolutely. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is a neuroscientist and USC professor, and she has spent her career studying education and the ways we can enhance it. Her findings claim th … | Continue reading
Few leaders are as well equipped to guide us through the thickening fog of our digital transformation as Vijay Tella — CEO of enterprise orchestration unicorn Workato. He honed his expertise as a “digital plumber” with TIBCO, engineering the world’s first “middleware” platform (a … | Continue reading
Upon viewing the night sky, many frequently wonder what remains unseen. This long-exposure image captures a number of bright stars, star-forming regions, and the plane of the Milky Way above the southern hemisphere’s ALMA observatory. The nearest stars are only a few light-years … | Continue reading
The moon is back. In 1966, the Soviet Union made history by soft landing a spacecraft on the moon for the first time. Three years later, Apollo 11 would deliver NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon’s surface. By 1976, spacecraft from the US and USSR had reac … | Continue reading
It’s 2030, and artificial general intelligence (AGI) is finally here. In the years to come, we’ll use this powerful technology to cure diseases, accelerate discoveries, reduce poverty, and more. In one small way, our journey to AGI can be traced back to a $1 million contest that … | Continue reading
I am a college student, and I am quite interested in playing volleyball with others. I am a beginner, so I always feel alienated while playing with them. The ball stays with hardly 4 or 5 players on the court, and the rest of us are just standing there, and I return to my room fe … | Continue reading
According to current physics, the universe began with a Big Bang, leading to an expanding universe where matter, hydrogen, stars, and galaxies formed. From exploding stars came planets, and eventually, life emerged, leading to human beings and technology as we know it today. Quan … | Continue reading
Doomerism about the state of the planet is widespread. Many see climate change as an insurmountable problem that we won’t be able to tackle. But the reality tells a different story, says data scientist Hannah Ritchie. By stepping back to look at the data and at how the world has … | Continue reading
When I was growing up, I would spend hours playing role-playing computer games. And while I could spend a happy evening discussing my Top Five (my email is open…), one of my all-time favorites was the Fallout franchise. At the start of every Fallout game, you had to create your c … | Continue reading
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever built on Earth. Accelerating protons up to energies of ~7 TeV apiece — to energies about 7000 times greater than their rest-mass energy as given by E=mc² — it smashes protons circulating clock … | Continue reading
At Big Think+, we understand the importance of data-driven decision-making and how crucial it is for learning leaders to have instant access to valuable learner data. With the launch of our new Analytics feature, you can easily identify the trends and successes that enable you to … | Continue reading
Riley, the main character of the 2015 animated movie Inside Out, is based on director Pete Docter’s daughter, Elie. Elie had previously served as the inspiration for Russell, the boy scout who tags along with grumpy old man Karl and his floating house in Up. Like Russell, she had … | Continue reading
This week, the writer and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff published a practical, short essay on how to make better long-term decisions through “second-level” thinking. As she details in the piece, many — if not most — of the decisions we make each day often solve for immediate … | Continue reading
For as long as humans had been conducting science, there was a seemingly immutable law of nature that was never violated: that in any reaction occurring in the Universe, mass was conserved. If you took a boulder and cleaved it into two, the two pieces would have the same mass as … | Continue reading
The following is the conclusion of Chapter 2 from the book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto by Jason Crawford, Founder of the Roots of Progress Institute. The first section of this chapter told the story of progress as one of increasing human agency. The entirety of the book will be … | Continue reading
On Aug. 24, in A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting over 3 cubic miles of debris up to 20 miles (32.1 kilometers) in the air. As the ash and rock fell to Earth, it buried the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. According to most modern accounts, the story pretty much … | Continue reading
For some nostalgic fans, the four images below prove that professional tennis is dead — at least as a spectator sport. Taken over the past half-century, they map changes in the pattern of wear and tear on the turf at Wimbledon’s Centre Court during the annual tournament. The 1970 … | Continue reading
Imagine being alive in the late 1800s, and thinking about one of the most important physical phenomena in the Universe: light. A number of things that we take for granted today were already known about it. We knew that light: moved at the speed of light, around 300,000 km/s, exhi … | Continue reading
Teaching math as if there’s only one correct way to solve a problem makes us think that we’re problem-solving, but instead, we’re “answer-getting.” I’ve seen it so many times, but none bothers me more than watching elementary and middle school students solve word problems in this … | Continue reading
With some imagination and hard work, AI can be applied to increase the financial performance of a business by such a large margin that if the company is publicly traded, its stock price will increase as a direct result of large-scale AI adoption. For an entirely new business, it … | Continue reading
One of the most revolutionary scientific laws was first put forth by Isaac Newton way back the in 17th century: the law of universal gravitation. Very simply, it hypothesized that between any and all masses in the Universe, there was an attractive force acting on both of them: th … | Continue reading
What is the most fundamental nature of matter? As early as 2,500 years ago, Greek philosophers debated this question. Democritus and his mentor Leucippus advanced the model most similar to that accepted by modern science. They proposed that at the smallest scale, the world was ma … | Continue reading
When I was put in charge of the UK’s $20 billion global aid budget, it was easy to imagine I had “power.” I was a Secretary of State, appointed by the Queen. I had people working for me all over the world. Every day, I was asked whether I wanted to put $100 million into education … | Continue reading
Within our Solar System, it’s hard to appreciate just how big, massive, and well-separated our planets, moons, asteroids, and more are. A logarithmic chart of distances, showing Voyager, our Solar System, the Oort Cloud, and our nearest star: Proxima Centauri. In jumps of factors … | Continue reading
In 2017, Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, penned an article for The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Her answer to that scary question was an unequivocal, “Yes.” Analyzing large datasets, such as the Monitoring the Future survey … | Continue reading
Because machine-learning models can give false predictions, researchers often equip them with the ability to tell a user how confident they are about a certain decision. This is especially important in high-stake settings, such as when models are used to help identify disease in … | Continue reading
Right now, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator/collider ever built. Accelerating protons up to 299,792,455 m/s, just 3 m/s shy of the speed of light, they smash together at energies of 14 TeV, creating all sorts of new particles (and antipart … | 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, and you just bought your first electric vehicle. You took the … | Continue reading
I was wondering if too much empathy could be a bad thing. Because I think, in general, we use the word “empathy” as a positive thing. If someone has a high level of empathy, they are considered a good person. I understand empathy as the ability to know what another person is feel … | Continue reading
You’ve heard of cognition. Now, here’s metacognition: the act of thinking about thinking. Arthur Brooks, author and public speaker, explains how metacognition helps us reflect on our emotional life, allowing our prefrontal cortex to evaluate signals from the limbic system. For in … | Continue reading
When you think about the word “anxiety,” it likely comes with a negative connotation. But anxiety is a normal human emotion that nearly all of us experience. Reframing anxiety as a tool for change, adopting concepts from Zen Buddhism, and striving to live in a ‘flow state’ can qu … | Continue reading
Every year in August, the night sky comes alight with meteors, as planet Earth plows through the debris stream of Comet Swift-Tuttle, giving rise to the Perseid meteor shower. Because of Swift-Tuttle’s large, massive size and the fact that it’s been in its present orbit for thous … | Continue reading
Legal systems have historically provided protection, promoted interests, and offered retribution in pursuing justice and addressing injustices. Central to these systems is the concept of a “legal person,” an entity that can hold “standing” in the judicial system. Traditionally, t … | Continue reading
A curated series exploring philosophical, strategic, and practical ways of connecting our knowledge of the past to our plans for the future. | Continue reading