The Latest from Big Think

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Large telescope inside an observatory dome, showing metal structure, supporting beams, and curved reflective surfaces under artificial lighting.
In 2025, two cleverly designed studies claimed to find evidence of strange objects orbiting Earth — years before humanity had put anything in space.
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"Publish or perish" has become an academic cliché. But the biggest casualty isn't researchers — it's scientific discovery itself.
John Templeton Foundation
double slit experiments with electrons send one at a time
The double-slit experiment, hundreds of years after it was first performed, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics.
blue sky
The sky and oceans are both blue. It's not because one reflects the other. Science explains them both, but for very different reasons.
A man in a red shirt gestures with his hands. The text “MOND vs. Dark Matter” is displayed over a starry black background.
There are two rival ideas to try to make sense of the Universe: dark matter or modified gravity. Can a new cosmic test settle the issue?
Two galaxies collide in deep space, creating bright star clusters and glowing gas clouds against a dark, star-filled background.
The newest find recovers the earliest merger in galactic history: just 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Here’s what we know today.
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Short fiction is powerful because of its constraints. By compressing language and time, it achieves a singular intensity the novel cannot.
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In an age of information overload, reliable sources are easy to access but often difficult to identify.
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Charisma isn’t a fixed trait reserved for a lucky few — it’s a set of learnable behaviors.
A close-up view of a textured surface with a mottled pattern in shades of brownish-purple, evoking the appearance of uneven expansion and hinting at the mysteries of cosmic fate.
Recent evidence could indicate the Universe doesn't expand evenly. Does that change our expected fate: Big Rip, Big Crunch, or Heat Death?
oldest trees
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.
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It's both easier and more beneficial than you may think.
Time isn't the same for everyone, even on Earth. Flying around the world gave Einstein the ultimate test. No one is immune from relativity.
Diagram showing the cosmic microwave background with cartoon probes at various angles, illustrating signal analysis—such as cosmic birefringence—over time from 0.37 million to 1.38 billion years after the Big Bang, revealing intriguing aspects of cosmology.
We assume there's no preferred frame of reference in the Universe, and that light behaves the same in all directions. What if we're wrong?
A woman and young boy sit together in front of a partial map of Africa with highlighted regions and target symbols.
The medicines already existed. The challenge was reaching people in time. Muso’s model of proactive community healthcare is showing what becomes possible when care moves closer to families.
Skoll Foundation
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Leadership isn't defined only by the biggest moments we face. It's shaped in the moments between them.
Black and white image of a rocky, irregularly shaped asteroid with a rough, bumpy surface—possibly an early stage of dirty snowball planet form—set against a black background.
We've now found many "conjoined" objects in the asteroid and Kuiper belts, including the first contact trinary, Nysa. What does it all mean?
On Earth's surface, we accelerate at 1g: 9.8m/s². In orbit, the acceleration is only slightly less. So why, then, are astronauts weightless?
nasa merge black hole
Newton thought that gravitation would happen instantly, propagating at infinite speeds. Einstein showed otherwise; gravity isn't instant.