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Philosophy
Examine life’s biggest questions, from ethics to existence, with curiosity and critical thinking.
Media provocateurs and conspiracy theorists insist that they're "just asking questions." No, they aren’t.
We tend to assume our view of the world is objective and accurate rather than subjective and biased — which is what it really is.
There are billions of potentially inhabited planets in the Milky Way alone. Here's how NASA will at last discover and measure them.
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There are two kinds of suffering. One is pure pain. The other makes life worth living.
John Templeton Foundation
What Odysseus needed from his father was something more important: the comfort of being a son.
You've heard of Stephen Hawking. Ever heard of Renata Kallosh? Didn't think so.
John Templeton Foundation
An analogy explains the greater fool theory: You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away; you just have to run faster than the other guy.
With two different black hole event horizons now directly imaged, we can see that they are, in fact, rings, not disks. But why?
Any alien civilization that grows to span an entire planet would spark the same effects that we have. So, what do we do about it?
In New Zealand, ambitious Kiwis want to launch a lawn mowing business; in South Africa, it's cooking gas refills. Start-up dreams vary widely.
Technology will not save the world, and it is inherently neither good nor bad. But, when tech is coupled to human virtue, good will prevail.
The engineer working on Google's AI, called LaMDA, suffers from what we could call Michelangelo Syndrome. Scientists must beware hubris.
The sonnenrad is a Heathen symbol composed of 12 repeated runes.
A dispute marked by flags and booze has been replaced with an official land border.
An elaborate device called the Mechanical Turk defeated Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte at chess. Edgar Allan Poe revealed the hoax.
The answer to this question depends on how you define "freedom."
According to author and entrepreneur Steven Kotler, at some point this century, we will confront the prospect of immortality.
John Templeton Foundation
Prison is an unreliable method of punishment. Let's do better.
Science doesn't fit neatly into ideology.
John Templeton Foundation
In all of science, no figures have changed the world more than Einstein and Newton. Will anyone ever be as revolutionary again?