bigthink.com
Every bigthink.com story we have translated and published, newest first. · 120 stories
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Most accurate cosmic clocks show unexpected instability
In all the cosmos, pulsars are the most precise long-term way to measure time. The rate of orbital decay of a binary pulsar is highly depend
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The case that madness is philosophy in practice
I have twice undergone uninterrupted periods of roughly two months each in which I was “mad” and was diagnosed as “psychotic” by psychiatris
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5 ways to become more “high agency” in the age of AI
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. After s
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Joanna Stern spent a year testing the AI future. Here’s what she learned.
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 w
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Ask Ethan: How did atoms come to be?
At the core of everything we’ve ever touched, seen, or interacted with here on Earth is the same humble physical structure: the atom. Each h
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The gap between knowing better and doing better, and how to close it
Most of us can recite the benefits of exercise, gratitude, and patience while doing none of it. Tal Ben-Shahar calls this the Knowing-Doing
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The “hidden laziness” holding you back, according to a Tibetan Buddhist master
Here are three stories about laziness. Or maybe not. 1. Sam’s just returned from work exhausted and slouches onto the sofa. So, Sam’s partne
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Do gravitational waves show evidence of wave-particle duality?
The world forever changed back in February of 2016, when the LIGO collaboration made arguably the biggest scientific announcement of the 21s
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The information paradox at the heart of every black hole
When something falls into a black hole, where does the material ultimately go, and will it, or the quantum information that it contained, ev
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Misery is an emotional feature, not a glitch in the system
Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina (1878) about happy families being all alike but unhappy ones each being unhappy in their own way a
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One blip isn’t enough to declare “dark matter has been detected”
Since it was first proposed way back in the 1930s, scientists have wondered about whether the matter we know of — atoms, their constituents,
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Scientists map massive layer of life just beneath our feet
Directly beneath our feet stretches a world both smaller and much, much larger than the one we know. Scientists have just begun mapping what
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This 3-step method to simplify your life starts with your obituary
Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz want you to think deeply about death. Not in a morbid sense, mind you. Rather, imagine you’re wri
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The psychological trap that distorts how you see difficult people
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 fe
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Only four days each year are actually 24 hours long
To mark the passage of time, we assign 24 hours to each day, universally. Most of us are very used to 24 hours being in a day but aren’t use
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Beyond the Odyssey: A beginner’s guide to Greek mythology
The success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) has motivated many moviegoers to pick up their own copy of the ancient poem. But while
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Ask Ethan: Do white holes, the opposite of black holes, physically exist?
In our Universe, the mathematical forms that the laws of physics take on give us all of the possibilities for what’s allowed to conceivably
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The 19th-century veterinarian who nearly cracked one of medicine’s oldest mysteries
As far as presenting the case for germ theory, James Law’s 45-page report “Influenza in Horses,” which appeared in the Report of the Commiss
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How to debate, from a two-time world champion
Two-time debate champion Bo Seo breaks down why arguments fail: the four bad-faith personas that hijack conversations, a four-question frame
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History shows that human progress is a myth
There are two different kinds of stories. The first is the linear story. The characters start at position A and end at position B, having be
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The test pilot who made airplanes safer (by teaching us how to break them better)
In the years following the Wright brothers’ 1903 takeoff, aircraft were designed via what a NASA history calls “an intuitive, daring empiric
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Does the expanding Universe stretch space or create new space?
It’s been nearly a full century, almost 100 years, since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe:
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The secret your brain uses to decide how much pain you feel
We treat pain like a plumbing problem. Something in the body is broken, so we block the signal with medication or cut it out with surgery. T
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Leadership isn’t natural — but making intelligent decisions can be learned
Every day as a leader brings an endless flow of judgment calls, big and small. Even as you read this, you might be weighing where to focus y
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