The Latest from Big Think

Text reading "The Latest" in a large, serif font on a light background.
Book cover titled "Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want" by Attia Qureshi and John Richardson, featuring bold "never settle" typography on a striking blue background.
Agreeable people may be a pleasure to be around, but they also have a harder time walking away from a bad deal.
World map showing total radiance change from 2014 to 2022, with areas highlighted for dimming (purple) and brightening (yellow) in nighttime lights.
Light pollution now steals a pristine night sky from the majority of humanity. The rise of LED lighting, primarily since 2014, is to blame.
Illustration of multiple spiral galaxies and stars being pulled toward a central black hole in deep space, with blue and purple light streaks tracing the motion along a dark energy curve that shapes the universe.
Today, in the here-and-now, a full 13.8 billion years have elapsed since the start of the hot Big Bang. But would that be true for everyone?
atom quantum
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
Three side-by-side images of a spiral galaxy show increasing detail and brightness, highlighting dust, stars, and a bright galactic center with radiating diffraction spikes.
Messier 77 is one of the largest nearby spiral galaxies, with an active, brilliant core. Here's what JWST's incomparable eyes saw inside it.
A person in dress shoes steps onto a blue ladder with a missing rung, casting a shadow on a pale background—a subtle nod to the challenges of navigating a nonlinear career.
As traditional career paths break down, a more uncertain — and potentially more fulfilling — model is taking shape.
A sliced onion bulb with roots and stem, illuminated from behind and set against a black background, resembles the delicate layers of daffodils in bloom.
What the near-death experiences of daffodils can teach us about resilience, death, and becoming someone new.
A robot stands next to a young girl who is sitting at a table, writing in a notebook with food and drinks nearby.
A look at what could be if we ignore the doomers and make the most of AI.
A graph showing star brightness over time during a Kuiper Belt occultation event, with a grayish planet above and two plotted lines labeled Fukushima and Kiso Obs—shedding light on the discovery of distant atmospheres.
A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto. Here's what we know today.
Ancient wall fresco depicting a standing human figure, surrounded by red, green, and brown decorative panels—an evocative remnant bearing the marks of history’s lost voices and the passage of time.
Historian Jess Venner discusses how “critical fabulation” can help reveal the lived experiences of Pompeii’s voiceless residents.
Four people wearing backpacks and outdoor gear hike through a grassy, forested area with trees in the background under an overcast sky.
The soils of "managed forests" can take decades to rebuild the carbon stocks and microbial communities found in undisturbed forests.
A dense star field and distant galaxies with bright galaxy clusters and several white squares highlighting specific points in the image.
Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.
A detailed view of Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, showing its icy surface with light and dark regions, photographed against a black background.
Triton is Neptune's largest moon today, but it was once the undisputed king of the Kuiper belt. Here's why the outer solar system matters.
A grid of closed yellow doors, with a few open ones revealing blue sky, a floral pattern, and handwritten text—reminding us how small habits make a big difference. Pale green circles highlight the open doors.
Author Daniel Coyle has spent a lot of time around people with exceptional social habits. These are some that stood out.
Book cover for "The Creatures' Guide to Caring" by Elizabeth Preston, featuring two woodpeckers on a yellow background with blue and red text, perfectly capturing the heart of the creature’s guide to caring.
Banded mongooses highlight the deep link between cooperation and conflict in nature.
A deep space image showing numerous distant galaxies of various shapes and sizes scattered across a dark background, revealing just how empty is space between these cosmic islands.
There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.
A man stands in front of a collapsed wooden building with debris scattered around in an outdoor setting.
A counterpoint to zero-sum thinking from Japan.
Book cover of "Cold-Blooded Murder" by Craig Stanford, featuring a close-up of a green lizard’s head—evocative of komodo dragons—set against a black background with striking orange and white text.
Tourism and environmental threats are shaping the fragile future of these iconic, surprisingly intelligent island predators.
two particles different wavelength speed of light
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.