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The dying brain experiences a surge of electrical activity. Could this help explain the mysterious phenomena of near-death experiences?
If our Universe were born a little differently, there wouldn't have been any planets, stars, galaxies, or chemically interesting reactions.
A recently identified stage of sleep common to narcoleptics is a fertile source of creativity.
Perhaps the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
"Superhabitable" planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.
Some scientists think we should allow our bodies to more harmlessly live with pathogens until they’re cleared from our systems.
It’s safe to use your face cream, as long as you aren’t eating it.
The Shirky Principle states that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
5mins
Geniuses and prodigies are captivating. But generalists rule the world.
John Templeton Foundation
A surprising JWST discovery around Fomalhaut has a different, superior explanation: not a great dust cloud, but a mere background object.
If something exists, it is by definition natural.
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Your chronological age and your biological age aren’t the same thing. This ex-Yale professor explains how to tell the difference.
The first-of-its-kind approval could change how we think about gene-edited foods.
42mins
Sabine Hossenfelder talks about Albert Einstein, dead grandmothers, the physics of aging, and more in this full interview with Big Think.
7mins
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Nurse defines the 5 core principles of life.
Cyberattacks are growing in number and sophistication.
The classic picture of Jupiter's great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
7mins
This network physicist is mapping the world's most significant data to create the most beautiful visualizations of information we have ever seen.
John Templeton Foundation
Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.
Massive objects like black holes, stars, and rogue planets routinely pass near our Solar System. An ensuing comet storm could destroy us.
A next-generation instrument on a delayed rover may be the key to answering the question of life on Mars.
There may be a symmetrical interdependence between order and chaos.
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our "lucky stars" enabled our existence.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That's not good enough.
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.
Some say that the Sun is a green-yellow color, but our human eyes see it as white, or yellow-to-red during sunset. What color is it really?
Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.
The researchers rebuked writers, scholars, and public figures for lazily perpetuating the notion of widespread gender bias in academic science.
"In order to seek truth," Rene Descartes once wrote, "it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things."
Let us share this miracle with mothers in poor countries.