The Latest from Big Think

Text reading "The Latest" in a large, serif font on a light background.
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Every leading scientific idea today will eventually be proven wrong: superseded by a more correct one in the future.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.
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.
laniakea
What's communicable or reachable is different from what's observable and unobservable, and all of that will evolve as the Universe expands.
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.
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.
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?
Four identical decorative faces with leafy headpieces are shown in a row; the third face is circled in purple with lines and stars drawn around the group.
Two thousand years before the sitcom, ancient Greek playwrights were mining sex, politics, and family drama for laughs.
Map showing the Roman road network with orange lines representing DARMC routes and black lines representing Itiner-e routes, with total lengths for each.
A new digital atlas increases the Roman road network by 59% — and it changes how we think of the Empire.
invisibility cloak
Two types of nanotechnology, metalenses and metamaterials, could soon make Star Trek's long-imagined "cloaking device" a reality.
A digital collage of a Cartesian wound, featuring a bright central light surrounded by fluid shapes, with realistic trees and deer on the left and a blue wireframe landscape with deer on the right.
René Descartes drew a line between humans and machines. AI is blurring it.
A schematic drawing of a human head filled with geometric spheres, symbolizing AI philosophies, with small figures working on a scaffolding structure around it.
AI will likely impact everything from the economy to the battlefield, but exactly how remains to be seen.
Two heart-shaped pendants on chains representing AI relationships: one pixelated with binary code “100101” and one smooth with the word “Friends” in cursive script.
AI is challenging the idea that relationships require two conscious minds.
A crowded, dimly lit indoor space where people standing together before a large window share a sense of human connection.
As AI makes life more efficient, people are seeking out real-world community — and all its messiness.
A surreal, multi-tiered scene of a permanent underclass composed of diverse figures and a robot, scattered across rocky levels above a dark red pool and a pile of gold coins.
Journalist Namir Khaliq heads west for an inside look at how AI is upending young tech workers’ visions of the future.