It’s currently billions of tonnes of fossil fuels every year. With new (or existing!) technologies, we could literally change the world. “In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far […]
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Effective Date: January 1, 2020 Last Updated: May 13, 2020 The Big Think, Inc. (“Big Think” or “we” or “us”) knows that you care about how your personal information is […]
If you want to know how we get something from nothing, you’d better understand what we mean! When we look around at our world and Universe today, we talk and think […]
Brown dwarfs are the ultimate failed stars, but they might not remain as failed forever. “[Brown dwarfs] appear to live a more exciting life than we presumed. They are too big […]
You might think that it should be all black, but then how would we see it? “It is conceptually interesting, if not astrophysically very important, to calculate the precise apparent shape […]
Some scientists posit that our brains are actually quantum computers.
It’s more than the Spore Drive, it’s about the heart of science fiction. If you’ve been following Star Trek: Discovery, you knew what we were headed for going into the mid-season […]
What Hubble sees at its best is only a tease for what James Webb will deliver. “With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe […]
A children’s hospital is “the first of many solar + storage projects going live” on the island, Elon Musk announced.
Multiple teams of scientists can’t agree on how fast the Universe expands. Dark matter may unlock why. There’s an enormous controversy in astrophysics today over how quickly the Universe is expanding. […]
Is life worse or better than non-existence? And if it is, who is judging? Welcome to anti-natalism, a small but lively corner of philosophy.
Do you ever act irrationally? You probably have. Let’s take a look at how to fix that.
Your theory predicts something novel? How nice. But no one will pay you any mind unless you test it. “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards […]
TRAPPIST-1 is 40 light years from Earth. It would take us millions of years to get there.
Marcus du Sautoy says that all of the greatest discoveries are behind us. Others are not so sure.
Imagine a world in which all the babies born each day were randomly redistributed among the biological parents. The infant assigned to any given set of parents could be white, […]
The Space Aggressor squadrons develop strategies to defend against space-oriented attacks.
Its 18 large, segmented golden mirrors aren’t even the whole story. But how much gold is really in there? “Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light […]
It seems intuitive that the best way to interpret how others are feeling would be to both see and hear how they’re behaving. However, a new study suggests that’s dead wrong.
What was going on in the world of health and strange bodily functions?
The persistent dream of a “gay utopia” is one of the constants in gay and lesbian historical imaginings over the last 200 years. But is it real?
Dark energy may be real and the Universe may be accelerating, but does that mean a Big Freeze is inevitable? “It’s everywhere, really. It’s between the galaxies. It is in […]
Now we know, on every scale. “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without […]
One of cosmic inflation’s cofounders came out against it, calling it not even science. But it is… and so much more. “There’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same […]
It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]
Nothing can escape from a black hole… but could another black hole pull something out? Once you fall into the event horizon of a black hole, you can never escape. […]
In his book, The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu claims we now worship celebrities like deities. This can lead to all sorts of problems.
With huge suites of data, we can extract plenty of signals where we know to look for them. Everything else? That’s where AI comes in. At the dawn of the 20th […]
Alpha Centauri A and B are just 4.37 light years away. Do they have planets around them? And possibly life? We just might find out! “Resources exist to be consumed. And […]
Some have deemed old-fashioned light bulbs as good as dead. But researchers at MIT have devised an incandescent light that’s greener than ever.