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Our brains are gambling addicts placing bets on what reality holds. And sometimes, they bet wrong.
7mins
We’ve been asking whether we have a purpose. Philosopher Alan Love says the better question is: what kind of purpose can we identify, document, and explain?
Neither Vannevar Bush's "Science: the Endless Frontier" nor OSTP's "Science: A New Golden Age" got it fully right. Here's what they missed.
Obviously, the gas giants all top this list. But the fall-off is rapid after that, and the final two spots in the top 10 are truly shocking.
Books to expand your perspective on history, philosophy, space exploration, and more this year.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
1hr 7mins
Physician Giulia Enders walks through 5 body parts, explaining what each one reveals about how we work, heal, and recover.
1hr 53mins
Members
Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis.
Andrew Yang, the one-time Democratic presidential candidate, thinks America’s political system is broken. Can third parties fix it?
10mins
How do you unlearn a story about yourself that the whole world seemed to agree on? Margaret Cho has been working on that answer for a long time. This is where she landed.
Unlikely Collaborators
When people choose the greatest scientist of all, Newton and Einstein always come up. Here's why they should pick Johannes Kepler instead.
Machine learning tools are allowing scientists to better understand forms of intelligence that operate on spaces and timescales utterly unlike our own.
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?
You don't talk yourself out of it. You out-evidence 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.
Early on, the entire Universe was ionized. Without the forbidden two-photon transition, it would have remained that way for far too long.
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.
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
46mins
Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's 3 conditions for stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity.