The National Institutes of Health hopes synthetic biology can engineer vaccines that outperform nature.
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Helium and carbon are made copiously in the interiors of stars. But the in-between elements? They’re rarities everywhere. If you were to take every element in the periodic table and […]
We have arrived: Big Think’s most popular video of 2019 tells us light exists outside of time.
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We’re Earth’s first intelligent, technologically advanced civilization. But maybe not the last. For most of our planet’s history, life in some form has existed on our world. Planet Earth formed some […]
Maybe, but that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does. Of all the unsolved puzzles in the Universe, perhaps the most confounding is the dark matter problem. If we look […]
While the world considers future trips to Mars, two astrophysicists make a case for exploring asteroids.
If your goal was to destroy the science of astronomy and astrophysics, this is exactly how you’d do it. One of the perks of being President of the United States of […]
Being stuck at home is not as intense as being away from Earth, but there are ways to cope in either scenario.
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Scientists recently discovered a black hole that’s smaller than previously thought possible.
Why does dark matter, if it doesn’t dissipate energy, become gravitationally bound at all? One of the most puzzling components of the Universe has to be dark matter. Although we have […]
The anthropic principle has some fascinating scientific uses. And abuses, too. For thousands of years, humans have pondered the meaning of our existence. From philosophers who debated whether their minds could […]
What’s more massive than the heaviest known neutron star but lighter than the lightest known black hole? LIGO may be about to solve that mystery. Whenever a star is born in […]
And one of our planets has the orbiting moons to prove it. Despite the dangers posed to planet Earth by a comet or asteroid strike, our Solar System is actually an […]
Black hole mergers are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. Could the gravitational waves they produce ever harm us? The Universe is not a static, stable place. Out […]
The visible light portion of the spectrum is tiny compared to the whole thing. Here’s what we’re missing. When you look at the Milky Way in visible light, you might see […]
On Tuesday, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the space rock, located some 4 billion miles away from Earth.
What if all planets were the same distance from Earth as the Moon?
If you’re right all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.
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Our planet is rare, precious, and fragile. It’s up to all of us to be its steward. With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very […]
There are three answers depending on what you consider the “edge,” but only two of them are known. If you were to go as far out into space as you can […]
If they have mass, then why don’t we see any slow-moving ones? For decades, the neutrino was among the most puzzling and elusive of cosmic particles. It took more than […]
An entire Universe of possibilities await stars like our own, even after they run out of fuel. One of the most profound rules in all the Universe is that nothing lasts […]
The dream of multi-messenger astronomy is to seen an event with gravitational waves, neutrinos, and light all together. The newest candidate just might get us there. When it comes to cataclysmic […]
The pendulum didn’t tick right when they brought it here: the start of a fascinating story. For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of […]
Imagine how different our understanding of the Universe would be if we saw nothing beyond the Milky Way. Our corner of the Universe was gifted with a plethora of bright, nearby […]
Conspiracy theories about the event dating back to the 1970s are in fact more popular than ever.
An exclusive interview with physicist Lee Smolin reveals how abandoning Einstein’s dream may have been a terrible mistake.
If galaxies are cities in the Universe, how unfortunate that our ‘cosmic country’ is dissolving. On the largest cosmic scales of all, planet Earth appears to be anything but special. […]
A NASA-led study suggests the stress of spaceflight seems to trigger various types of herpes to reactivate in astronauts.
It’s a supergiant star in the final stage of its life, and it just dimmed by an enormous amount. What’s going on? When you take a look at the stars in […]