The Latest from Big Think

Text reading "The Latest" in a large, serif font on a light background.
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 a fragile flower can teach us about resilience, death, and becoming someone new.
A shirtless man, resembling Tommy Caldwell, climbs a steep rock face high above the ground, reaching for a hold with one hand and gripping the rock with the other; trees and a valley stretch out below.
A day in the Sierra Nevada with Tommy Caldwell reveals how pain, trauma, and “elective hardship” became the foundation of his fortitude.
Futuristic Mars habitat with transparent walls, showing people tending to green plants and fungi inside. Astronauts and rovers are visible on the red, rocky Martian surface outside.
Instead of hauling heavy building materials across space, future astronauts may grow fungal shelters from spores, waste, and local regolith.
Illustration of a dumpster filled with discarded electronics, cables, and a cracked laptop—clear evidence of planned obsolescence—with computer components, trash bags, wires spilling out, and a detached eyeball above.
A broken laptop hinge revealed a broader shift in how modern products are designed, sold, and owned
A young child sits on a sidewalk holding a scraped knee next to a fallen scooter, evoking reasonable childhood independence, with collage elements including a helicopter, art print, and abstract lines.
When can a kid play outside alone? Two parents, one stranger, and the state collide.
A pixelated silhouette of a leaping cheetah, inspired by d/acc aesthetics, appears to disintegrate into square particles against a blue grid background.
AI is unlocking unprecedented capabilities — and exposing new vulnerabilities just as quickly.
Digital illustration showing a large sphere with red dots and data labels, referencing kessler syndrome, accompanied by close-up insets and smaller circular and linear patterns on the right side.
We’ve populated low-Earth orbit with satellites in record time — now we have to figure out how to keep it safe.
A collage of overlapping browser windows displays various images—symbols, people, gold bars, and abstract patterns—all connected by dashed red lines, evoking the tangled web of conspiracy theories.
Long-debunked conspiracies don’t disappear—they evolve and thrive in the age of algorithms.
A pattern of multicolored triangles with various abstract textures and designs on a muted blue background evokes the resilience paradox, balancing vibrancy and calm in a harmonious display.
When applied blindly, resilience can do real harm to our health and our ability to change broken systems.
Book cover of "True Color" by Kory Stamper, featuring illustrations of twelve colored book spines—echoing the era of the dye famine—arranged in a grid on a beige background.
When America lost access to German dyes, the crisis revealed a startling truth: color was chemical, tactical, and essential to warfare.
A bald man wearing glasses and a peach-colored button-up shirt sits facing the camera against a plain white background, holding his right hand slightly raised.
32mins
Neurologist Richard Cytowic has spent decades studying synesthesia, the phenomenon where one sense involuntarily triggers another. 
logarithmic history of universe
In a 13.8 billion year old Universe, a few seconds hardly seems like it matters. But these minuscule changes sure do add up over time.
Two peculiar galaxies collide in deep space, forming bright clusters and swirling dust clouds—a striking scene that reveals the beauty and violence of the cosmos against a dark background.
Most massive galaxies are spiral or elliptical shaped. But peculiar galaxies showcase the beautiful violence that helps explain our cosmos.
Illustration of a person's silhouette with geometric shapes and a smaller head profile inside, set against a textured beige background with abstract black lines.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch on why reflective self-consciousness separates us from intelligent machines.
The book cover of "How Flowers Made Our World" by David George Haskell features a large pink orchid, lush nature scenery, and hints at the evolutionary history of flowers, with text in white and yellow on a dark background.
Once land plants, seagrasses staged one of evolution’s boldest reversals — returning to the ocean and reinventing their biology to thrive beneath the waves.
Historic map illustration of a star-shaped fortified city with surrounding moat, labeled roads, and buildings visible outside the city walls.
First rising in the 15th century, these forts sought to counter a deadly innovation in military technology.
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.
Early on, the Universe needed near-perfect flatness, or atoms, stars, and galaxies couldn't form. What happens once dark energy takes over?
The book cover of "Love Thy Stranger" by Bart D. Ehrman features a painting of four biblical figures and the subtitle, inspired by the command to "love thy stranger," exploring how Jesus’ teachings transformed Western moral conscience.
Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman contends that our modern sense of altruism can be traced back to the radical shift in ethical thinking sparked by Jesus' teachings.
Older man with gray hair wearing a dark suit, patterned tie, and blue shirt, gesturing with both hands, seated against a plain white background.
21mins
Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why the Bronze Age collapsed, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.
bok globule barnard 68 dust wavelength
The image you're seeing isn't a hole in the Universe, and the cosmic voids that do exist aren't hole-like at all.