Science & Tech

Science & Tech

Explore the discoveries that reveal how the world works, alongside the technologies that extend, reshape, and sometimes challenge what’s possible.

A field of distant galaxies in space with a blue-tinted, magnified section highlighting a single bright celestial object observed by JWST, possibly rich in oxygen.
In a galaxy less than 300 million years after the Big Bang, oxygen's presence abounds. That's expected; its absence would truly be profound.
A black and white image of a ball in antigravity motion.
In general relativity, matter and energy curve spacetime, which we experience as gravity. Why can't there be an "antigravity" force?
The very word "quantum" makes people's imaginations run wild. But chances are you've fallen for at least one of these myths.
how many planets
There will always be "wolf-criers" whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
Illustration of a person holding a cup while selecting a book from a shelf filled with various colorful book spines.
Revisiting the year’s noteworthy nonfiction.
cosmic rays
Particles are everywhere, including particles from space that stream through the human body. Here's how they prove Einstein's relativity.
jwst Abell 2744 450 million
If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it's a JWST image or any other observatory.
A person with a shaved head, beard, and blue-framed glasses—reminiscent of Demis Hassabis—looks at the camera with their hand resting on their face against a dark background.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
spooky action quantum
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
A woman in a red dress is gracefully ice skating on a frozen lake.
While ice itself is slick, slippery, and difficult to navigate across under most circumstances, skaters easily glide across the ice.
An artist's impression of an ultra high energy cosmic ray.
The highest-energy particles could be a sign of new, unexpected physics. But the simplest, most mundane explanation is particularly iron-ic.
A nebula in space glows with bright purple, pink, and blue hues, surrounded by stars and cosmic dust where new stars form in our expanding universe.
Our Universe doesn't just expand and cool, but the expansion itself is accelerating. Can stars form under such structure-erasing conditions?
An older man with a white beard sits on a chair against a white backdrop, with a large, colorful DNA double helix illustration in the background.
54mins
“How can all the diversity and, sort of, seeming order that's out there in the world emerge from a process dependent upon chance?”
Aerial view of a river delta with branching waterways, shaped by natural intelligence, flowing into the sea and surrounded by green and brown land.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Diagram illustrating Earth's orbit around the Sun, showing the tilt of Earth's axis, the seasons, equinoxes, solstices, and directions to celestial poles.
Earth orbits the Sun while spinning on its tilted axis, with two annual occasions marking that maximal tilt. That's where solstices arise.
Two monkeys sit on a tree branch interacting, with brain diagrams and EEG waveforms in the background, one with a purple arrow pointing to its head.
By tracking brain activity as primates move freely in the wild, neuroethology could reshape what we think we know about our own minds.
nuclear fusion
The Department of Energy's newest mission seeks to make a unified AI platform across all national labs. Will it help US science, or kill it?
A man stands on stage before an audience, with a backdrop reading "A Night of Awe & Wonder" and the John Templeton Foundation logo.
Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe.
A diagram illustrating one of the biggest mysteries: the origin of the universe, from the Big Bang and inflation to today, showing the formation of atoms, stars, galaxies, and the ongoing expansion of space.
Our Standard Model of the Universe, for both particle physics and cosmology, remains intact for now. When will its foundations crack?
Diagram showing light from a distant galaxy bending around a red-hued massive object, reaching telescopes on Earth via different paths and at different times.
With the observation of SN 2025wny, a lensed superluminous supernova, astronomy's future comes into sharp, exciting focus.