The Great Epizootic of 1872 gave James Law the evidence he needed to challenge centuries of thinking surrounding the origins of disease.

In technology, we make cumulative advances that withstand time. Not so in politics and ethics, argues philosopher John Gray.

The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?

The Earth is neither flat nor round. Actually, it's somewhere between a potato and a billiard ball.

Our collective knowledge has made us better off, but only when communities and social institutions adapt it for the common good.

We live in a four-dimensional Universe, where matter and energy curve the fabric of spacetime. But time sure is different from space!

Big Think’s latest poster is a detailed look at humanity’s loftiest enterprise so far: making it off-planet.

Most of us have heard that the Sun is an ordinary, typical, unremarkable star. But science shows we're actually anything but average.

"Publish or perish" has become an academic cliché. But the biggest casualty isn't researchers — it's scientific discovery itself.

The double-slit experiment, hundreds of years after it was first performed, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics.

The sky and oceans are both blue. It's not because one reflects the other. Science explains them both, but for very different reasons.

Short fiction is powerful because of its constraints. By compressing language and time, it achieves a singular intensity the novel cannot.

1859's Carrington event gave us a preview of how catastrophic the Sun could be for humanity. But it could get even worse than we imagined.

As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?

Ferris Bueller's advice to pause and observe life is more relevant than ever in our fast-paced digital age, where Amy Herman emphasizes the importance of not only reflection but also enhancing our perception skills.

Books to expand your perspective on history, philosophy, space exploration, and more this year.

From Viking tales to modern anthropology, the idea of the "savage" has shaped how outsiders viewed Indigenous societies — and justified attempts to dominate them.

Scientists are livid over the OSTP director's official report to the President. Will it lead to a new golden age for US science, or end it?

200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.

From Stephen King’s Maine to Steinbeck’s California, Big Think's “A Literary Map of the United States” charts the stories that changed how we see a nation.