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Until April of 2026, only 24 astronauts had ever left low-Earth orbit. The Apollo 11 crew, after safely returning to Earth from their historic voyage to the Moon, are shown in the Mobile Quarantine Facility alongside then-President Nixon. All 24 astronauts who journeyed to the Moon as part of the Apollo program, either orbiting or landing on it, were safely returned to Earth. Credit: NASA/JSC In 1968, Apollo astronaut Bill Anders — one of the first — captured this iconic photograph. Thi

Here in our Universe, the light that gets emitted from objects isn’t necessarily the same as the light that arrives in either our eyes or our instruments. Not only are there many intervening effects that can alter a signal on the way — by interacting with fields, by passing through neutral and ionized matter, and by having to compete with sources of noise — but there are kinetic (motion-based) and gravitational (spacetime-based) effects that alter those signals while in transit as well. In parti

Trauma doesn’t end when the danger does, and for decades, science couldn’t explain why. Rachel Yehuda, a leading PTSD researcher, has spent her career inside that question, uncovering the way that trauma can leave impressions on our genes, sometimes passing biological echoes of those events to the next generation. Now, she’s focused on MDMA therapy, which could actually break the chain. This video This isn’t a trip, it’s the most challenging therapy session of your life is featured on Big Think

What determines the extent of employers’ wage-setting power? It boils down to how easily — borrowing Beyoncé’s phrase — you can “release your job” when pay isn’t good enough. But how simple is it for someone to quit Walmart if they are dissatisfied with their wage? To answer this question, my collaborators Suresh Naidu and Adam Reich and I surveyed about 10,000 Walmart workers in 2019 using a Facebook-based strategy, similar to the Shift Project. As we saw previously, Walmart, the nation’s large

With the launch of Artemis II in April of 2026, humans are finally set to add to the historical precedent set in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a return to the Moon. Prior to their expected arrival at our nearest neighboring planetary body, expected to occur after just over a four day journey, a gap of more than 50 years persisted between human visits to the Moon. During the Apollo era, only 24 people ever flew to the vicinity of the Moon, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth to

For early 16th-century Europeans, this map was a revelation. It showed a previously unknown island metropolis in the recently discovered Americas — an alien Venice, if you will. However, by the time this first European portrait of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was published in 1524, the city, once home to perhaps 200,000 people, was already gone — razed in 1521 by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. In its place, Mexico City would eventually rise. Yet this is more than the ghost map of a recent

Most people spend years searching for a mentor who will change their life, never realizing the most valuable lessons are already happening around them.  Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec breaks down why the traditional idea of mentorship is not only outdated, but actively getting in the way of your growth. This video The hidden reason smart people stop growing is featured on Big Think.

There’s a legendary bit of wisdom that applies just as well to theoretical physics as it does to the drug culture from which it arose: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” While theoretical physicists are famous for coming up with extraordinary, creative, exotic scenarios for what may yet be possible in the Universe, there’s a great danger in buying into such an idea, and thinking that it’s likely, before a sufficient amount of supporting evidence has come in in favor of it. This was the fallacy

In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale.

In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked, this hole would have exposed life on Earth to dangerous — and in some regions potentially lethal — levels of radiation, but an international treaty brought us back from the brink of disaster. That treaty, the Montreal Protocol, is a lesson in human resilience: We can save the world, because we already

Not long ago, I found myself in line at my local dry cleaner. It’s a modest shop, the kind of place you’ve passed a thousand times without a second thought. But the man behind the counter — let’s call him Howard — is not a modest man. He pays an almost fussy, forensic level of attention to every customer. He remembers names and checks garment tags twice. He asks follow-up questions about a persistent wine stain on a lapel that suggest he genuinely, deeply cares about the outcome of his work. Whe

When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumpster, what do we experience? It might well be disgust or dismay, but it’s rarely awe or wonder.  Yet rats may be one of the most awe-worthy animals on the planet. They have survived global apocalypses, far-flung abandonme

I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink. A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!” Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces,

For nearly every sport, there are innate attributes that can give an athlete an edge. Basketball has a height advantage. With NFL linemen, a little girth tends to help. Most jockeys are small and lean. The best ballet dancers are light on their feet. A high limb-length ratio offers some runners a natural advantage. With sumo wrestling, it’s … well, you get the point. In rock climbing, a few such traits include longer fingers, shorter forearms, and scraggly wrists, all of which might help a climb

To live on Mars, humans will need more than rockets and ambition. They will need habitats that can protect them from radiation, brutal temperature swings, and an unbreathable atmosphere. Building such shelters on Earth wouldn’t be a challenge — we could construct an airtight box, pile on radiation shielding, and call it a day. But off-world construction runs into one overwhelming constraint: the upmass problem. Though reusable rockets are driving down the cost of sending cargo into space, it is

A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived. I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, causing it to flop around like a broken limb. I had already made the trek from the village where I was staying to the nearest repair shop once before, but the repairman’s first fix (epoxy that reinforced the hinge) only

To Mallerie Shirley and Christopher Pleasants, nothing felt “revolutionary” about the way they were raising their two kids. Then a stranger called child protective services. It started last November in Atlanta. With school closed on Election Day, the couple’s 6-year-old son, Jake (not his real name), wanted to ride his scooter by himself to a nearby playground while Mallerie and Christopher worked their tech jobs from home. They had recently begun allowing Jake to play outside alone, and other k

AI tools like RFdiffusion have made protein design dramatically easier, cheaper, and faster. This is accelerating vaccine development, opening new paths for treating genetic diseases, and making science more accessible — labs that couldn’t afford to work on certain problems before now can. Those are real gains. They’re also new kinds of exposure. The same tools that speed up vaccine development can be used to accelerate pathogen development. The same accessibility that lets a small lab design a

In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, claimed that every two days, humanity was creating as much information as it had generated from the dawn of civilization through 2003 — 48 hours’ worth of texts, photos, articles, tweets, and other content added up to more than five exabytes of data, according to Schmidt.  Since then, generative AI has helped take our shift from information scarcity to information abundance to a whole new level — as of September 2025, we were generating more than 16 exa

For most people, Tuesday is just the name of a weekday. For 1 in 23 people, Tuesday is also brown, tilted to the left, and tastes metallic. Neurologist Richard Cytowic has spent decades studying synesthesia, the phenomenon where one sense involuntarily triggers another.  Cytowic makes the case that the cross-wiring synesthetes experience is present in every human brain, just quieter. This video The neuroscience behind synesthesia is featured on Big Think.