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Science and Tech
"What modern science has taught us is that life is not a property of matter."
Life arose on Earth early on, eventually giving rise to us: intelligent and technologically advanced. "First contact" still remains elusive.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
DUNE is designed to detect the Universe's most antisocial particle: the neutrino.
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?
We need more data centers for AI. Developers are getting creative about where to build them.
There is one obstacle that reliably blocks innovative ideas: how we fund science.
Many contrarians dispute that cosmic inflation occurred. The evidence says otherwise.
In all the Universe, only a few particles are eternally stable. The photon, the quantum of light, has an infinite lifetime. Or does it?
A simple semantic device — invented by a forgotten senator — can help us break “the curse of knowledge.”
The big question isn't whether the Universe is expanding at 67 or 73 km/s/Mpc. It's why different methods yield such different answers.
The recent discovery of a large cave on the Moon highlights the importance of caves not just for future space explorers but astrobiology as well.
He peppers his sentences with words like “neat” and “cool,” he’s not great at working the room after dinner — oh, and he's a peerless visionary.
Manipulating a signaling pathway in mice reversed their anxiety — and offers hope for a new class of anti-anxiety medications for humans.
Most stars in the Universe are located in big, massive, Milky Way-like galaxies. But most galaxies aren't like ours at all.
These missions will put us one step closer to the ultimate goal: crewed trips to Mars.
The largest particle accelerator and collider ever built is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Why not go much, much bigger?
Welcome to the Big Think debut of The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
More than any other equation in physics, E = mc² is recognizable and profound. But what do we actually learn about reality from it?
Slowing growth and limiting development isn’t living in harmony with nature—it is surrendering in a battle.
How has tennis changed in recent decades? The wear and tear on Wimbledon’s Centre Court may tell the tale.
For centuries, Newton's inverse square law of gravity worked beautifully, but no one knew why. Here's how Einstein finally explained it.
Quarks and leptons are the smallest known subatomic particles. Does the Standard Model allow for an even smaller layer of matter to exist?
From size to mass to density and more, each world in our Solar System is unique. When we compare them, the results are truly shocking.
What are we supposed to do when experts look at the same data yet reach starkly different conclusions?
More accurate uncertainty estimates could help users decide about how and when to use machine-learning models in the real world.
Today, the Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle physics experiment in history. What would a new, successor collider teach us?
The lithium-ion alternatives could help create a safer, greener future.
Dark matter's hallmark is that it gravitates, but shows no sign of interacting under any other force. Does that mean we'll never detect it?
A recent paper in the journal Physical Review Letters claims to prove that a "kugelblitz" is not possible.