The Latest from Big Think

Text reading "The Latest" in a large, serif font on a light background.
A woman in traditional attire stands among a group of people, next to maps showing global data with colored grids and overlays.
A growing movement shows that protecting the world’s forests — and the people who have safeguarded them for centuries — is one of the most powerful, and overlooked, tools in the fight against climate change.
Skoll Foundation
Book cover of "Our Best Work" by Nilofer Merchant, featuring a torn paper design that reveals the subtitle: "Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us." Perfect for anyone seeking to do their best work.
To bring the best out of your teams, don’t flex like Maximus — lean into a “helpful fight” instead.
Jim Belushi, wearing a cowboy hat, sits outdoors on a bench surrounded by large jars of green plant material, with a river and trees in the background.
The actor, comedian, and marijuana cultivator on collaboration, success, and overcoming nerves — in business and life.
hubble tension
Even space and time are relative in Einstein's universe. That means our old notions of "where" and "when" no longer apply on cosmic scales.
A traffic signal warning sign is partially submerged in floodwater.
The idea that it’s “too late” to reduce emissions fuels cynicism and despair, putting us on an even worse trajectory.
A grayscale statue of a bearded man, inspired by Confucian wisdom, sits at a modern office desk with a computer, keyboard, mouse, and grid-patterned background with colored circles.
The great Chinese philosopher offers a durable and practical blueprint for harmonizing with our work colleagues.
A satellite with extended accordion-like solar panels or reflectors, possibly supporting AI data centers in space, orbits above Earth, with the planet’s surface visible in the background.
There are plenty of engineering obstacles, and those can be overcome. But you cannot change the laws of physics, and those matter too.
The fundamental building blocks of reality are indivisible: quanta that cannot be split or divided. Our understanding remains incomplete.
A set of large blue numbers from 1 to 9, with the number 2 in bold red and black scribbles drawn over it.
What’s in a number? Only a vanishingly small slice of your life, it turns out.
White lines intersect around a central, glowing sphere on a black background, creating a complex geometric and abstract pattern that suggests how nothing can persist when the universe dies.
Long after the last star burns out, the Universe will experience its end state: a heat death. Will everything prior then be meaningless?
A solid orange rectangle fills the entire image without any patterns, text, or distinguishing features.
Science fiction romanticized Mars as a place of adventure and future settlement; science tells a very different story.
quark gluon plasma primordial soup
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we finally found them.
Illustration of ape to human evolution with skeletal figures, labeled amino acids, and colorful dots representing molecular structures, highlighting metabolism and the origin of life on Earth.
A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. The metabolism-first scenario just might be the best one.
A gloved hand arranges five test tubes labeled with book titles and authors in a white rack against a light background.
The “dystopian” biotech imagined in these novels is now changing real lives for the better.
An illustration of a padlock with one half depicting a DNA strand and the other half showing a green circuit board pattern, symbolizing biodefense, set against a pink background.
From global DNA screening standards to safeguards for benchtop synthesizers and AI tools, a new biosecurity playbook is taking shape.
simple collage of runner
Technology, shifting rules, and human ambition push athletes beyond biology’s perceived limits.
A silhouette of a person reading a book sits on abstract, geometric stairs overlaid on collaged text and blue circular patterns.
Books don’t just stimulate the mind — they trigger physiological changes throughout the body.
Illustration of silhouetted people on scaffolding assembling a large globe with a crane hook against a textured pink background.
New biotech tools could clean up everything from construction to agriculture.
A split image explores the nature of life, with a gray rock on a dark background on the left and a colored microscopic view of a cell—hinting at intelligence—in vivid detail on the right.
Sixty years ago, a little-known philosopher challenged how science understands life. His perspective is finding new relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.
Illustration of various animal and human silhouettes in colored circles connected by arrows, set against a textured abstract background, evoking themes of speculative evolution.
Speculative evolution explores the strange paths natural selection might have taken — and what that means for humans.