Big Think

Here on Earth, brilliant spectacles occasionally illuminate our night skies. The peak of January 19, 2026’s auroral display was brief, and visible in spectacular fashion only for the short period of time where the Earth’s and Sun’s relevant magnetic fields were anti-aligned during the intense solar radiation storm that sent charged particles rapidly from the Sun to Earth. The resulting photograph, from northern Scotland, is one of the best views of this brief light show. Credit: Phil Hawley/

Steve Brusatte, the paleontologist behind Jurassic World’s science and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and The Story of Birds, walks through what fossils actually prove versus what Hollywood invented.  Brusatte traces dinosaurs back to footprints smaller than a house cat, found in Poland just after the worst mass extinction in Earth’s history, and explains why those early survivors spent millions of years as background characters next to car-sized salamanders and armored crocodiles.

Earlier this year, Jamir Nazir, a retired Trinidadian civil servant with no public writing career to speak of, won both the regional and overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize for “The Serpent in the Grove.” The story follows Vishnu, a Trinidadian man and alcoholic, who tries to kill his wife, Sita, in an attempt to escape his life. Within days, the win sparked controversy, as readers, writers, and critics accused Nazir of using AI to write the story, citing evidence like its “heavily polished”

65 million years ago, the trajectory of life on Earth was changed in an instant: when a massive asteroid, speeding through the inner Solar System, crashed into our planet. In the blink of a cosmic eye, thousands upon thousands of species that had previously dominated the world for millions of years went extinct, including 100% of the flying reptiles, non-avian dinosaurs, ammonites, and the giant marine reptiles, as well as massive populations of mammals, insects, clams, and land-based plants. Du

A philosopher who walked away from an elite academic career to spend 3 years washing dishes in a monastery says that intellectual life has nothing to do with degrees.  Zena Hitz argues that the real philosophers are taxi drivers, office clerks, and prisoners: Everyday people who exist outside the cult of academia. This video The myth of genius, and who it intentionally leaves out is featured on Big Think.

Dan Carlin has spent decades explaining history’s collapses. Now he’s watching one happen in real time. In conversation with Kmele Foster, Carlin unpacks the state of societal collapse, the erosion of our nation’s shared truth, and the sharp comparison between the 80’s’ Xeroxed flyers on windshields and the present day flooding of information.  He explains why the Constitution was designed to prevent tyranny, not efficiency, how that tradeoff is finally being tested, and why Congress’s refusal t

Here in our cosmic backyard, the Sun is the ultimate source of light, heat, and energy that powers life on our planet. It therefore only makes sense that we’d want to know, if the Sun is just an ordinary star like so many others in the Universe, how many of them there are within our cosmic horizon. Calculating the number of stars within the presently observable Universe is a daunting task to take on, but one that astronomers and cosmologists have risen to, and now have determined with only very

We live according to our beliefs. Some beliefs we know well. A Christian knows they believe in God. An ethical vegetarian knows they believe eating animals is wrong. But other beliefs swish around in the rock pools of our unconscious. They are tacit assumptions that motivate our actions but never appear on an employment contract or in a legal document. And even though we rarely pause to examine them, these beliefs or narratives will steer our lives. They are why we get out of bed, think the way

Out there beyond the Milky Way, there’s much more than a typical telescopic view reveals. While our eyes might be drawn to the enormous, massive, bright spirals and ellipticals that can be found all across the Universe, the reality is that for every Milky Way-like galaxy out there, there are dozens or even hundreds of small, low-mass, very faint galaxies: the dwarf galaxies of the Universe. Even though large, bright, massive galaxies contain the majority of our Universe’s stars, the majority of

In a TikTok video that has racked up 1.4 million likes, men are handed scissors and a sheet of paper and asked to cut out a Christmas tree while describing their favorite memory with their partner. The men start telling a story, but most trail off as they concentrate on the cutting. In another clip, a woman calmly juggles four different chores while her husband struggles to put on socks and hold a conversation simultaneously.  These videos are designed to make you laugh. But they also reflect an

Billiards is a sinful game. An indulgence of lowlifes and reckless gamblers. Everybody knew that in 1826, or they did if they read that year’s June 2 issue of the Richmond Enquirer. It was here that editor Thomas Ritchie informed his readers of how Congressman Samuel Carson took to the floor during a debate over appropriating $14,000 for furnishing the White House to denounce the president’s use of public funds to create a gambling den within its hallowed walls!  To quote the gentleman from Nort

What if enlightenment is not a permanent state, but a habit we regularly return to? Andrew Newberg, MD, Robert Waldinger, MD, and Jim Al-Khalili, PhD, explore how moments of awe, unity, and insight can alter the brain and reshape our sense of reality. From neuroscience to Zen practice to the limits of scientific knowledge, they argue that enlightenment may be less about arriving somewhere and more about how we act once we feel connected. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interv

If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate the Universe in a way that compelled nature itself to provide the answers to your deepest questions in a fashion that was comprehensible to you. When any two quanta of energy interact — irrespective of their properties, including whether they’re particles or antiparticles, massive or massless, fermions or bosons, etc. — the result of that interaction has the potential to inform you about the un

If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, you’ve certainly heard of them — if not in school, then on Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Composed by the second-century Roman emperor in his tent on nights between long marches and bloody battles, they’re one of the foundational texts of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that first emerged around 300 B.C., and which has recently found an unlikely second life on social media. Stoicism’s modern-day resurgence has been traced back to viral marketin

All across the Universe, we can learn what stars are made of simply by taking a spectrum of the light coming from them. While some stars are low in what astronomers call metallicity — the fraction of elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium — and others have high metallicities, the ratios of the heavy elements inside of them are normally fairly consistent. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe; carbon is fourth, followed by neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron,

[In the early 1830s], a brash young printer named Benjamin Day launched a bold economic experiment: the one-cent Sun. A veteran of New York’s printer’s row, Day had spent several years working as a compositor at the New-York Evening Post, where he met fellow compositor Dave Ramsey, who dreamed of starting an affordable daily newspaper. At the time, the standard price for a newspaper was six cents — roughly the cost of a pint of whiskey or a quarter-pound of bacon — and the most successful weekly

Human beings are transformed by parenthood, grief, war, love, technology, and new ways of thinking. But the experiences that reshape us most are also the hardest to measure, predict, or govern. Yale professor of philosophy L.A. Paul argues that the future demands curiosity, humility, and a better understanding of how change remakes the people living through it. This video Why personal and collective risk-taking need completely different rules is featured on Big Think.

When JWST opened its eyes on the Universe, it glimpsed the Universe at farther distances, fainter magnitudes, and higher resolutions than ever before. One of the more profound surprises that emerged was a bright class of ultra-young, distant objects known as Little Red Dots. If all of the light from these objects were coming from their stars, they’d have to be ultra-massive at such early times: a colossal difficulty for our consensus cosmology to explain. The history of astronomy is all about us

Our observable Universe has evolved tremendously since its inception. During cosmological inflation, the space contained in the inflationary region grows exponentially, doubling in all three dimensions with each tiny fraction-of-a-second that passes. Where inflation ends, a hot Big Bang ensues. But due to quantum effects, each region where a Big Bang occurs will be surrounded by more inflating, exponentially expanding space, ensuring that no two regions where hot Big Bangs occur ever collide,

Life on Earth is older, stranger, and more grimly beautiful than we have time to consider most days. So take a moment to marvel over the recently discovered dark wonder that is the world’s oldest, deepest, and largest whale graveyard — a necropolis so vast it sounds less than a scientific find than the premise of a lost Jules Verne novel. A vast gash off the coast of Australia How old? The fossilized skull of a Pterocetus benguelae, an extinct species of beaked whale, has been dated to 5.26 mill