Big Think

Planet Earth possesses many impressively large mountains.

The connective ritual behind my closest friendships and the best teams asks the same question: What are you working on that you need help with?

“AI is helping me with my social skills,” one of my therapy clients told me.

Here in our Universe, there are few objects more awe-inspiring or mysterious than black holes.

From von Neumann’s blueprint, which predated the discovery of DNA, to viral genes that now help form our memories and placentas, Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that function defines life more than material does, and that AI belongs in the same story.

This article was the topic of a recent live event, hosted by the author.

Marie Antoinette was done dirty.

Malcolm Gladwell argues that almost everything most people believe about the Second Amendment is wrong.

One of the biggest questions that appears right at the intersection of physics and philosophy is as simple as it is puzzling: what is real?

In 1675, Madame de Sévigné wrote a letter to her daughter about a musician “broken on the wheel.”

The email arrived after midnight.

Donnie Darko turns 25 this year — and heads back to theaters on October 2nd.

Millions of Americans now use psychedelics, as mounting evidence suggests that substances like psilocybin, ketamine and ayahuasca may help alleviate depression and other mental health conditions.

One of the greatest challenges — and perhaps the most important challenge of all — for any theoretical physicist is to connect something you can predictively calculate to something you can go out and measure experimentally or observationally.

In an environmental ethics class, I had to write a short essay, 800 to maybe 1,000 words, every week.

The birth of the bond market started with a ruthless multinational raid that sent shock waves through the Mediterranean.

A special kind of vertigo kicks in when you start clicking the camera icons scattered across the world map at World Watcher Live.

Jennifer Doudna, biochemist and CRISPR co-inventor, walks through the technology’s biggest ethical flashpoints: the 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, the use of gene drives to spread edited traits through wild populations like mosquitoes,…

Jennifer Doudna, biochemist and CRISPR co-inventor, walks through the technology’s biggest ethical flashpoints: the 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, the use of gene drives to spread edited traits through wild populations like mosquitoes,…

There’s a huge problem with our attempts to uncover the origins of the Universe: we only see our Universe as it is today, 13.8 billion years after the conditions marking the hot Big Bang first came into existence.

Cosmically, humanity is a mere drop in the Universe’s vast ocean.

If you’re not a member, then probably someone you know or love is: that shrinking, but still substantial guild of book-balancers who build towers of paperbacks on their nightstands.

I have never read Crime and Punishment (1867).

What’s happening in your brain and body while you’re lost in a great book?

For countless generations, humanity has gazed at the stars, planets, and great canopy of the Milky Way in the night sky, wondering who else or what else may be out there.

Jonathan Rauch, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, dives into the philosophy of liberalism, how it has created and transformed our institutions, and the state of truth in a world rife with misinformation.

Map fans and book lovers: Now that’s a Venn diagram with a big overlap.

In film, there are many ways to tell a story that involves time travel.

In most organizations, preparing for disruption when everything is working smoothly almost never happens.

By all accounts, Donnie Darko shouldn’t exist.

In some ways, the deepest question one can ask about our physical reality is simply, “What is the Universe made of?”

Fourteen years after co-inventing CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna checks in on what it’s become.

Although many people struggle to name even one living scientist, practically everyone around the world knows who Einstein was.

In all the cosmos, pulsars are the most precise long-term way to measure time.

I have twice undergone uninterrupted periods of roughly two months each in which I was “mad” and was diagnosed as “psychotic” by psychiatrists.

In a recent OpenAI town hall, CEO Sam Altman was asked his opinion on the most important skill people should learn in the age of AI.

In the introduction to her new book, I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, Joanna Stern describes a typical day in what could conceivably be all of our futures.

At the core of everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or interacted with here on Earth is the same humble physical structure: the atom.

Most of us can recite the benefits of exercise, gratitude, and patience while doing none of it.

Here are three stories about laziness.

The world forever changed back in February of 2016, when the LIGO collaboration made arguably the biggest scientific announcement of the 21st century, altering our view of the Universe forever.

When something falls into a black hole, where does the material ultimately go, and will it, or the quantum information that it contained, ever come back out again?

Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina (1878) about happy families being all alike but unhappy ones each being unhappy in their own way applies just as well to feelings.

Since it was first proposed way back in the 1930s, scientists have wondered about whether the matter we know of — atoms, their constituents, and other subatomic particles — represent all the matter that exists in the Universe, or whether there’s an unseen…

Directly beneath our feet stretches a world both smaller and much, much larger than the one we know.

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz want you to think deeply about death.

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and I’m on a video call with an executive I’ll call Marcus, who is explaining to me, with real precision and a few colorful words, what is wrong with a peer of his I’ll call Dev.

To mark the passage of time, we assign 24 hours to each day, universally.

The success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) has motivated many moviegoers to pick up their own copy of the ancient poem.

OBGYN and author Dr.