The Latest from Big Think

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Governance scholar and University of Pittsburgh professor Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Ph.D. on the forces that decide whether conflicted nations unify or unravel.
John Templeton Foundation
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8mins
“The purpose of a coach is to not be the one to set the goals, but instead to say, "Here are the kinds of goals we can work our way through.””
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3mins
The brain is an “illusion factory.” Here’s what that means for our perception of time.
Unlikely Collaborators
A detailed image of the Eta Carinae star system could trick science headlines with its bright, colorful clouds of gas and dust in blue, red, and purple hues swirling around a luminous central region.
Dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang are all part of a solid scientific foundation. Here's why popular media often claims otherwise.
A petri dish with a red agar medium shows various colonies of bacteria growing, with dense streaks on the right and scattered colonies on the left.
13mins
“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”
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Members
In the operating room, success isn’t about one person but the teamwork behind them. Surgeon Atul Gawande says those lessons under pressure apply far beyond medicine.
Four people work at consoles surrounded by monitors and control panels in a dimly lit NASA mission control room, with large display boards overhead.
What if the first search for life beyond Earth actually succeeded?
Scott Britton, in business attire, sits cross-legged on a desk meditating, while blurred figures move in the background.
Former tech founder Scott Britton wants to shatter the binary myth that separates driving ambition from inner development.
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12mins
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
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Planets grow from protostellar material in disks, leading to full-grown planetary systems in time. At last, the final gap has been filled.
A bald man in a blue suit and white shirt stands outdoors in Silicon Oasis, smiling, with autumn leaves and a blurred building in the background.
We chat with Mark Klarzynski, founder of PEAK:AIO, on how his company became an international player in data storage for the age of AI.
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Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
Book cover of "Do Aliens Speak Physics?" by Daniel Whiteson and Andy Warner, featuring a blue background, yellow and white text, and an illustration of a robot and people interacting.
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.
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1hr 12mins
“Consciousness is fundamental. It's a fundamental property of the world that we inhabit, a fundamental property of the universe.”
gravitational wave effects on spacetime
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
A timeline diagram showing portraits of various scientists, documents, and equations connected by arrows, illustrating the historical development of quantum mechanics.
16mins
“The messy reality of it is that all of these very smart people, including Isaac Newton, were talking to other people.”
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The great books aren’t just classics — they’re cultural Schelling points that give our minds a place to meet up in the world of ideas.
A grayscale portrait of a smiling man is overlaid on classical artwork with pink and black graphic elements, evoking a sense of desire. The text at the top reads "THE NIGHT CRAWLER.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
terraforming
The first world beyond Earth for human habitability should be the Moon, not Mars. This is why we should terraform our lunar neighbor first.
Two women at a window; one leans on the sill smiling, perhaps sharing jokes, while the other stands behind, partially concealed, holding a white cloth to her face.
Is your humor affiliative or adversarial?