Latest Articles

Latest Articles

The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.

periodic table
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That's absolutely no longer the case.
a man holding a large red, green and white flag.
For linguists, the uniqueness of the Basque language represents an unsolved mystery. For its native speakers, long oppressed, it is a source of pride.
an old man sitting at a desk reading a book.
A series of charts shows how prevalent different mental illnesses are across the globe — but how we define them matters.
Hubble view of galaxy containing GRB 221009A BOAT
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A behaved in unexpected ways that might help us understand how they occur.
a portrait of a man with a green background.
Descartes broke from the European philosophers who preceded him and devised a new way of considering humanity and the world.
a drawing of a man's head with an eye inside of it.
Brain activity may be more like "ripples in a pond" rather than signals sent on a telecommunications network.
globular cluster terzan 5
Sun-like stars live for around 10 billion years, but our Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. So what's the maximum lifetime for a star?
a person standing on a blue floor with their feet up.
A study found that older adults who cannot balance on one foot for ten seconds have an 84% higher risk of death than those who can.
a painting of a man standing outside of a building.
Centuries ago, the typical British coffeehouse was more like a "school without a master" than a place to grab a quick boost of caffeine.
a blue circle surrounded by red lines on a white background.
Neuroscientist and author Bobby Azarian explores the idea that the Universe is a self-organizing system that evolves and learns.
a pair of glasses with a fake bird's head on it.
At the turn of the millennium, a physicist fooled the global scientific community with the greatest discovery that never existed.
Black and white vintage illustration of a human brain viewed from the side, set against a solid light pink background.
7mins
Plato and Carl Sagan were wrong about the human brain, says a top neuroscientist.
NGC 1277 red and dead
With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, some galaxies are already dead. Their inhabitants might not know it, but we're certain.
a circular diagram with the names of different types of people.
The Foo Fighters are at the dead center of the map, so all the other bands are happier, sadder, angrier, or hornier.
an image of a black hole in the sky.
There are 40 billion billion black holes in the universe. Here’s how our Solar System stacks up against ten of them.
a man in a suit and tie covering his face with his hands.
"In witness whereof, the parties hereunto have set their hands to these presents as a deed on the day month and year hereinbefore mentioned."
a keyhole in the middle of a green field.
From gene expression to protein design, large language models are creating a suite of powerful genomic tools.
a black and white drawing of a group of people.
Mary Toft staged an elaborate hoax, but the pain was real.
a painting of a man standing next to a tree.
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”
John Templeton Foundation