Earth’s hottest cities are all in this little corner of the planet

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

What investors can learn from the world’s most resilient shrub

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Is it true that photons truly live forever?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Generative AI is not the panacea we’ve been promised

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Boost your communication skills with the “ladder of abstraction”

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

The Hubble tension: still unresolved, despite new measurements

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

A continental shift: EU membership grows in popularity (even in the UK)

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Finding caves on the Moon is great. On Mars? Even better.

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

How Bill Gates cemented the folkloric status of the “nerd founder”

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Why the “extremophyte mindset” is crucial to lasting success

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Relativity: the oldest physics principle that’s still correct

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Researchers discover an entirely new way to treat anxiety

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

The 3 ways people choose to die

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

How to navigate loneliness, according to neuroscience

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Human development has 5 key principles – here’s why they matter

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Why long-term vision and “fusion teams” are crucial to your AI strategy

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Our cosmic home is typical for stars, but not for galaxies

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

T-Minus: Counting down 10 upcoming moon missions

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

LLMs are a dead end to AGI, says François Chollet

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Everyday Philosophy: Can we overcome alienation by becoming more assertive?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

How does something come from nothing? A chemist explains

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Doomerism won’t fix the planet, but we can

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

How the “4 Types of Luck” can enrich your work-life

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Ask Ethan: Could we build a collider bigger than Earth?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Introducing Big Think+ Analytics: Real-time analytics for your learning programs

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

“Inside Out 2” creators on rediscovering joy and being a better parent

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

The long-term benefits of “second-level” thinking

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

3 big lessons from Einstein’s most famous equation: E=mc²

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Why harmony with nature is a myth

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Found: Records of Pompeii’s survivors

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Do these pictures prove tennis is dead?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

How a failed experiment led to Einstein’s first big revolution

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

The big myth that keeps people from loving math

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Why an “AI-first” business plan will produce stratospheric startups

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Einstein’s big insight that explained Newton’s law of gravity

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Subatomic puzzle: Are quarks and leptons hiding another level of matter?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Why we should end the fantasy of the “Turnaround CEO”

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

5 big surprises when comparing the worlds in our Solar System

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Potato chips or heroin? The debate on social media and mental health

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

When to trust an AI model

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Starts With A Bang podcast #108 – A future particle collider

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Solid-state batteries are finally making their way out of the lab

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Everyday Philosophy: How much empathy is too much empathy?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Yes, you CAN control your emotions — with these techniques

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Your guide to 2024’s Perseid meteor shower

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Legal personhood: Extending rights to nature?

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


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago

Hindsight

A curated series exploring philosophical, strategic, and practical ways of connecting our knowledge of the past to our plans for the future. | Continue reading


@bigthink.com | 4 months ago