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Despite their rarity, boron and beryllium can both be detected within white dwarf atmospheres. What does their presence and abundance imply?
America’s penny press transformed journalism in the 1830s, using hoaxes, sensationalism, and mass circulation to create a blueprint for modern media.
When JWST opened its eyes, it spied a huge number of Little Red Dots. What we saw inside was a puzzle, but what's missing could solve it.
After a period of cosmic inflation came to an end, the hot Big Bang commenced. 13.8 billion years later, we arrived. Here's how we got here.
In a lightless canyon at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Earth has been quietly collecting dead whales. Scientists have just discovered the archive.
Once you cross over to the inside of an event horizon, you can never come out again. But then, how do black holes emit all sorts of things?
Introducing Big Think’s first-ever poster — a stunningly detailed infographic of the universe from its earliest moments to the present day.
This 11-point scale aims to reduce the number of "false alarm" sightings so scientists can focus on harder-to-explain reports.
Nature evolved swarm intelligence in species like bees and fish. New AI-powered communication systems could help humans devise their own “collective superintelligence.”
Oort cloud object Bernardinelli–Bernstein has the largest known cometary nucleus: 119 km wide. An impact with Earth would be catastrophic.
The family might be a terrible way to raise kids. But it's the best we have.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angel Down, Daniel Kraus uses a single unbroken sentence to convey the psychological toll of being a soldier in World War I.
The Universe took a great many steps to create not just life, but intelligent life, here at home. What can we say about life beyond Earth?
The road to emancipation began when enslaved Americans seized an opportunity for freedom and forced the nation to reckon with slavery's role in the Civil War.
The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don't abuse it!
Vast arrays of planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, and more populate our Universe. Within each category, differences can be astounding.
Contracting gas clouds don't just make a single star, but a spectrum, with all different masses. Early on, that spectrum differed. But why?
Neuroscientist Anil Seth on the deep differences between human minds and artificial ones.
Protons and neutrons are composite structures: made of quarks and gluons. But knowing they had substructure goes back long before that.
Our motivations and sense of self may be more deeply shaped by our connections and social history than we think.