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Science and Tech
A childhood spent under the spell of sleight-of-hand taught me skepticism, curiosity, and the habit of looking beneath appearances.
Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, "extragalactic SETI," and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age.
All of the matter that we measure today originated in the hot Big Bang. But even before that, and far into the future, it'll never be empty.
A conversation with Dr. Susan Schneider on the AI risks we’re not talking about and why the fixation on AGI is misplaced.
As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works must evolve. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.
Brian Gumbel — President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Dataminr — explores the cutting edge of real-time information analysis.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
Neuroscientist Rachel Barr shares her favorite books on the brain and how they shaped her approach to the field.
Just because a paper passes peer review doesn't mean that what's written, or what the author asserts, is true. Here's why it still matters.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
It's not just an odd quirk of numbers that makes it true, but a deep mathematical insight that dates all the way back to Pythagoras.
Organic compounds can form through simple chemistry alone — making the search for true biosignatures trickier than it seems.
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today's best answers.
Even when leaders know disruption is a smart long-term decision, the pain of transition can produce a titanic shambles. Just ask Kodak.
Despite the claims of speed reading apps and programs, you actually have to read the book if you want to learn.
The fear of unleashing forces beyond control has haunted science for centuries.
Strategyzer CEO Alex Osterwalder on why entrepreneurs should take a leaf from Amazon’s innovation playbook.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
Strengthen your focus like a muscle.
It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.
Real understanding, argues Jeff DeGraff, doesn’t come from outputs — it comes from practice.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn't one?
JWST isn't the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn't even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.