Latest Articles

Latest Articles

The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.

A person in a white t-shirt seen in a repeating, stacked motion, resting their head on an open book placed on a table.
Busying yourself with research often feels easier, safer, and more satisfying than taking action.
An adult and baby giraffe gracefully stand in a lush, grassy field with trees in the backdrop, showcasing nature's wonder that no government can censor.
Every leading scientific idea today will eventually be proven wrong: superseded by a more correct one in the future. Getting there is hard.
An older man in a yellow polo shirt and khaki pants sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop in a hallway with arched ceilings.
1hr 1mins
Members
Physicist Paul Davies explores how chemistry first learned to write its own code, and what that reveals about the origin of life.
Two men speaking into microphones on a podcast, with a wooden peg doll featuring a question mark between them.
45mins
Philosopher Joe Folley on why the self is made rather than found, how attention got thinned into productivity, and why Camus’s later work matters most.
dark matter
Back in 1933, Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of dark matter. Only 40 years later, with Vera Rubin's work, did we take it seriously.
A woman in a red dress sitting in front of a backdrop featuring the painting “Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse.
2hr 18mins
Members
Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula explains what narcissism really is, how to spot it, and why most of what circulates online gets it wrong.
A middle-aged man with a shaved head and beard wearing a black button-down shirt gestures with his hands while speaking.
29mins
Luke Burgis argues that smartphones have made acedia, the ancient restlessness that pulls us away from the present, socially contagious.
laniakea
What's communicable or reachable is different from what's observable and unobservable, and all of that will evolve as the Universe expands.
A man sits in a chair in front of a white screen, flanked by a collage of colorful, expressive painted faces.
1hr 16mins
Luke Burgis explains how anxiety and opinion spread through groups by contagion, and what it takes to build a solid self that can stand apart from the crowd.
Book cover for “Sniff: A History of Smells” by William Tullett, featuring an illustration of two fish on a platter.
The modern world is still rich with scents, but we've become less adept at navigating life with our noses.
A bald, bearded man in a black button-down shirt gestures with his hand while speaking.
34mins
Luke Burgis explains how to keep a solid sense of self inside a community instead of dissolving into a pseudo self that changes with every crowd.
A pointed mountain peak emerging through a layer of clouds against a blue sky.
9mins
We’ve learned that even single-celled organisms can make intelligent decisions. What else can you expect from consciousness? Neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explains.
standard model structure
The idea of grand unification is a tempting one for our Universe, and a fascinating suggestion. But nature won't necessarily cooperate.
Double exposure portrait of a person with purple flowers superimposed over their torso.
6mins
What a red rose reveals about the hidden forces shaping your Perception Box
1g is our acceleration in Earth's gravity: 9.8m/s². If a spaceship constantly accelerated at that rate, here's how far we could travel.
Deep space image showing a cluster of stars and galaxies with a white rectangular outline highlighting a small dark area.
In this all-new Starts With A Bang podcast episode, find out how stellar streams have the power to reveal the nature of dark matter.
A wireframe digital hand representing AI consciousness reaches out from a computer screen to pet a black and white cat.
Our beliefs about AI consciousness may depend less on evidence and more on self-interest.
Book cover for the safer book “Safer: A Playbook” by Raj Panjabi, MD, with a foreword by Vivek H. Murthy, MD.
Drawing on his experience leading the White House's pandemic preparedness effort, Raj Panjabi explains how COVID taught him to prepare for the unexpected.
m87 jets black hole spitzer
Back in 2004, a supermassive black hole from 10.8 billion years ago was found, weighing in at 66 billion solar masses. How is this possible?