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A new bill introduced into the US Senate claims to make us safer. Instead, it would destroy all virology research, and for no real cause.

For millennia, diamonds were the hardest known material, but they only rank at #7 on the current list. Can you guess which material is #1?

NASA gave three robots plans for a moon shelter, and the robots figured out how to build it.

25 years ago, our concordance picture of cosmology, also known as ΛCDM, came into focus. 25 years later, are we about to break that model?

Black holes are the most massive individual objects, spanning up to a light-day across. So how do they make jets that affect the cosmic web?

Fathers’ brains adjust their structure and function to parenthood.

SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in humans in 2019. Despite much noise generated by lab leak proponents, the evidence indicates a natural origin.

A spherical structure nearly one billion light-years wide has been spotted in the nearby Universe, dating all the way back to the Big Bang.

We need a “theory that explains the evolution of evolution,” argues theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker.

Differences in certain avian and mammalian proteins explain why avian influenza doesn’t (typically) infect humans.

A non-invasive method for looking inside structures is solving mysteries about the ancient pyramid.

A Fermilab study confirms decades-old measurements regarding the size and structure of protons.

Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it’s magical.

The galactic center is home to the most powerful engine in the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole. How does its energy ultimately escape?

The CMB gives us critical information about our cosmic past. But it doesn’t give us everything, and galaxy mapping can fill in a key gap.

Astronomers see spiral and elliptical nebulae nearly everywhere, except by the Milky Way’s plane. We didn’t know why until the 20th century.

Since the mid-1960s, the CMB has been identified with the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Could any alternative explanations still work?

Cats twist and snakes slide, exploiting and negotiating physical laws. Scientists are figuring out how.

Here in our Universe, both normal and dark matter can be measured astrophysically. But only normal matter can collapse. Why is that?

A proton is the only stable example of a particle composed of three quarks. But inside the proton, gluons, not quarks, dominate.

The mutual distance between well-separated galaxies increases with time as the Universe expands. What else expands, and what doesn’t?

Statistician Talithia Williams on how math is the clearest path to understanding our existence.

Archaeologists have identified what may be Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure.

For billions of years on Earth, life was limited to simple unicellular, non-differentiated organisms. In a mere flash, that changed forever.

Perhaps it’s not just an oddly shaped hill, after all.

“By 2040, we hope to see a number of new drugs that have been designed with AI reaching patients.”

New research from Big Think+ on what scares your future leaders.

Scientists agree that eons ago, a bacterium took up residence inside another cell and became its powerhouse, the mitochondrion. But there are competing theories about the birth of other organelles such as the nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum.

Compared to people who took a placebo, the brains of those who took caffeine pills had a temporarily smaller gray matter volume.