The Latest from Big Think

Text reading "The Latest" in a large, serif font on a light background.
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 with light hair sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop, with a geometric blue and white pattern in the background.
1hr 5mins
Author Chris Bailey breaks down the "intention stack" and the underrated role of values alignment in follow-through.
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.
A person stands at the base of a staircase leading upward through an arrow-shaped opening filled with light and clouds.
2mins
Optimistic people don’t just “feel happier,” they literally process information differently, at a perceptual level. Three experts explain.
Unlikely Collaborators
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.
A man sits on a wooden chair with one leg crossed, gesturing with his hand, against a background of vintage sheet music.
59mins
Professor Michael Spitzer argues that music is something closer to a biological system, one that was shaping the human body long before we had words for what we were feeling.
Two people examine scientific equipment in a laboratory, working on a large metallic device surrounded by cables and tools, as they investigate the physics mystery G—the elusive mystery gravitational constant.
Newton's gravitational constant, G, is still known to just 3 significant figures in 2026. New measurements merely highlight our uncertainty.
The image displays the words "mental," "health," and "illness" in white and gray text on a black background, with "mental" and "health" in focus—reflecting the strength found within the unfragile mind.
As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may instead oversimplify it.
A middle-aged man with light hair and a beard, wearing a blue sweater over a white shirt, stands in front of a neutral background with faint, curved text elements.
8mins
Human origins once looked like a simple migration story. According to geneticist David Reich, new evidence keeps turning it into a record of contact, disappearance, and surprise.
pluto moons hubble
In 2006, the IAU defined "planet" for the first time, excluding Pluto and all other dwarf planets. In 2026, is it now time for a change?
A man in a suit floats underwater, releasing bubbles. The words "WORK WISE" are written vertically on the right side against a light green background.
Your to-do list isn't a debt to pay off. It's a menu to choose from.
Four maps of Ireland from 1800, 1850, 1900, and 2000 show a steady decline in areas where Irish is spoken natively, marked in green, nearly disappearing by 2000.
Gaeilge is trending culturally. So why is it, according to census data, also dying?
Aerial view of a large, modern data center complex with two main rectangular buildings separated by a central road, surrounded by fields and parking areas.
The AI energy debate focuses on supply — but smarter planning could deliver more computing from the same megawatts.
Cadence
A vibrant cosmic scene reveals a galaxy with bright jets of energy, hottest stars twinkling vividly amidst scattered stars against a dark backdrop.
From within our own galaxy to behemoths billions of light-years away, supermassive black holes create jets like nothing else in the cosmos.
Split image: left side shows a pencil sketch of a person's lower face, while the right reveals a painted portrait's lower face and neck with a red beaded necklace and ruffled collar—capturing hints of why we talk funny.
Long before today's debates, immigration was already transforming the American accent into something distinctively its own.
A close-up of a small snail with a light brown shell crawling on a dark, textured surface in sunlight.
A meditation on how our obsession with speed and productivity undermines our health, relationships, and chances for lasting success.