In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.
It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of ... Continue Reading »
During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon monoxide alarms. Due to their high metabolism and sensitive respiratory system, these small, yellow songbirds succumbed to the invisible, odorless gas much faster than humans. As soon as the small cages strapped to their tool belts stopped chirping and chattering, the miners knew it was time to head back up.
Several lifetimes and technological revolutions later, this unconventional safety measure has resurfaced in the title of a monumental study — one concerned with a different potential hazard: artificial intelligence. Published in late August by the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence constitutes one of the first attempts to trace, by means of actual, hard data, how AI is reshaping the American labor market.
The results are, fittingly, rather alarming. So far, the widespread adoption of generative AI appears to be hitting entry-level workers harder than older, more experienced people in senior positions. The study also suggests that ... Continue Reading »
Gratitude connects us, but how we express it might matter more than we think.
Baylor professor of psychology and neuroscience Sarah Schnitker explores how practicing gratitude can lead to stronger relationships and greater well-being. Her lab found that gratitude expressed through prayer may offer even more benefits than journaling or speaking it aloud, and that feeling connected to something larger may help combat today’s growing loneliness.
This video This research team studies gratitude. Here’s what they’ve found. is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Every year, the same meteor showers recur once again.
This comet, imaged in 2015 and known as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, brightened sufficiently to become as bright as magnitude +4: visible to the naked human eye even under fairly light-polluted conditions. When Comet Halley returns, it will only be about 5-6 times brighter than this, but when Comet Swift-Tuttle next returns, it will be about 20 times brighter. Swift-Tuttle is far more massive and dangerous than the other known periodic comets. Although comets have been recorded for thousands of years, their periodic nature was only uncovered in the 18th century, by Edmond Halley.
Credit: John Vermette / MIT News
As Earth revolves around the Sun, it periodically crosses cometary and asteroidal orbits.
Each year, Earth passes through the debris stream of various comets, including Comet Swift-Tuttle, which creates the visual phenomenon known as the Perseid meteor shower, and that of Halley’s comet, which creates two meteor showers: the Eta Aquarids and the Orionids. Although Comet Swift-Tuttle remains the single most dangerous object known to humanity, it’s Comet Tempel-Tuttle that has the honor of being the ... Continue Reading »
It’s no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger, more massive, more evolved, and are richer in stars but fewer in number than they were back in the early stages of cosmic history. By looking farther and farther away, we can see the Universe as it was at earlier times, but we’re going to be limited in many ways: by how deep our telescopes can see, by what wavelengths they’re capable of seeing, and by what small fraction of the sky they’re capable of observing.
That’s why an observing program like COSMOS-Web, the largest, widest-field JWST observing program to date, is so important. It isn’t just revealing galaxies as they are nearby (at late times), at a variety of intermediate distances (and earlier times), and at ultra-large distances (and the earliest times of all), but due to its wide-field nature, is revealing galaxy types of varying abundances: the common-type galaxies, galaxies that are ... Continue Reading »
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter — when the United States turned 40 years old, and the War of Independence was slowly starting to fade from living memory into history. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”
Jefferson couldn’t disagree more with the sentiment. Convinced that American democracy would survive only if the government could be repaired and updated, he and the other Founding Fathers made sure the Constitution came with a built-in provision for amending its own contents. Unfortunately, the conditions for pushing through such an amendment — a two-thirds majority from both houses of Congress and a three-fourths majority from state legislatures, as outlined in Article V — have proven exceptionally demanding.
As historian and journalist Jill Lepore explains in her new book, We the People: A History of the US Constitution, neither Democrats nor Republicans today consider Article V an ... Continue Reading »
Here in our modern Universe, even in just our own Milky Way, we observe stars in all different stages of life:
molecular gas clouds that are contracting and fragmenting,
leading to protostars and young stellar objects,
becoming full-fledged stars with protoplanetary disks around them,
conventional stars burning through their fuel with their own fully-formed planetary systems,
stars evolving into subgiants, giants, and even supergiants,
stars dying in planetary nebulae, supernovae, and other life-ending events,
and stellar remnants of now-extinct stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.
We can trace back the history of our Universe a full 13.8 billion years, to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, measuring the star-formation rate all throughout our cosmic history.
It was a full 9.2 billion years after the hot Big Bang first began, or roughly 4.6 billion years ago, that our Sun and Solar System began forming in our own Milky Way: some 27,000 light-years from the galactic center. And now, all this time later, human beings have risen to prominence here on planet Earth, having reconstructed our cosmic history more successfully than ever before. One of the ... Continue Reading »
If the U.S. were only 100 people, this is what they’d believe: 63 are Christian, 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 have a non-Christian faith.
This graph maps those differences out into more specific categories, bringing blink-of-an-eye clarity to a complex topic. But it does not show changes over time. And those changes add critical context.
If Americans were 100 people, 63 would be Christian, 30 would be “nones”, and 7 would be adherents of non-Christian religions. (Credit: Ryan Burge on X)
The graph is based on the third of Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Studies. Taken together, they reveal a dramatic drop in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian: from 78% in 2007, 71% in 2014, and down to 63% in its latest survey (2023-24).
That last figure, however, seems to be holding steady since 2019. In other words, the decline of Christianity in America appears to have stabilized. Here’s a closer look at the losses since 2007:
Protestants made up half of the American population in 2007 — if only just 51%. By 2023-24, that share had declined to 40%.
Among Protestants, the ... Continue Reading »
An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable.
When faced with a difficult problem — and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is — it can help to work backward, reducing and excluding what doesn’t work until what’s left over is a decent approximation of favorable traits. Evolution works in similar ways, so thoroughly destroying what doesn’t work that what’s left over tends to work quite well. Or think about health: What foods are good for you is an endless debate, and no one who’s honest with the evidence can say they know the perfect diet. But what’s bad for you is much more settled. I have no idea if a glass of red wine is good for me. I am 100% sure that cigarettes are not.
A young boy once asked Charlie Munger, “What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in life?” Munger replied: “Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains to ... Continue Reading »
In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.
It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of ... 
During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon monoxide alarms. Due to their high metabolism and sensitive respiratory system, these small, yellow songbirds succumbed to the invisible, odorless gas much faster than humans. As soon as the small cages strapped to their tool belts stopped chirping and chattering, the miners knew it was time to head back up.
Several lifetimes and technological revolutions later, this unconventional safety measure has resurfaced in the title of a monumental study — one concerned with a different potential hazard: artificial intelligence. Published in late August by the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence constitutes one of the first attempts to trace, by means of actual, hard data, how AI is reshaping the American labor market.
The results are, fittingly, rather alarming. So far, the widespread adoption of generative AI appears to be hitting entry-level workers harder than older, more experienced people in senior positions. The study also suggests that ... 
Every year, the same meteor showers recur once again.
This comet, imaged in 2015 and known as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, brightened sufficiently to become as bright as magnitude +4: visible to the naked human eye even under fairly light-polluted conditions. When Comet Halley returns, it will only be about 5-6 times brighter than this, but when Comet Swift-Tuttle next returns, it will be about 20 times brighter. Swift-Tuttle is far more massive and dangerous than the other known periodic comets. Although comets have been recorded for thousands of years, their periodic nature was only uncovered in the 18th century, by Edmond Halley.
Credit: John Vermette / MIT News
As Earth revolves around the Sun, it periodically crosses cometary and asteroidal orbits.
Each year, Earth passes through the debris stream of various comets, including Comet Swift-Tuttle, which creates the visual phenomenon known as the Perseid meteor shower, and that of Halley’s comet, which creates two meteor showers: the Eta Aquarids and the Orionids. Although Comet Swift-Tuttle remains the single most dangerous object known to humanity, it’s Comet Tempel-Tuttle that has the honor of being the ... 
It’s no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger, more massive, more evolved, and are richer in stars but fewer in number than they were back in the early stages of cosmic history. By looking farther and farther away, we can see the Universe as it was at earlier times, but we’re going to be limited in many ways: by how deep our telescopes can see, by what wavelengths they’re capable of seeing, and by what small fraction of the sky they’re capable of observing.
That’s why an observing program like COSMOS-Web, the largest, widest-field JWST observing program to date, is so important. It isn’t just revealing galaxies as they are nearby (at late times), at a variety of intermediate distances (and earlier times), and at ultra-large distances (and the earliest times of all), but due to its wide-field nature, is revealing galaxy types of varying abundances: the common-type galaxies, galaxies that are ... 
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter — when the United States turned 40 years old, and the War of Independence was slowly starting to fade from living memory into history. “They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.”
Jefferson couldn’t disagree more with the sentiment. Convinced that American democracy would survive only if the government could be repaired and updated, he and the other Founding Fathers made sure the Constitution came with a built-in provision for amending its own contents. Unfortunately, the conditions for pushing through such an amendment — a two-thirds majority from both houses of Congress and a three-fourths majority from state legislatures, as outlined in Article V — have proven exceptionally demanding.
As historian and journalist Jill Lepore explains in her new book, We the People: A History of the US Constitution, neither Democrats nor Republicans today consider Article V an ... 
Here in our modern Universe, even in just our own Milky Way, we observe stars in all different stages of life:
molecular gas clouds that are contracting and fragmenting,
leading to protostars and young stellar objects,
becoming full-fledged stars with protoplanetary disks around them,
conventional stars burning through their fuel with their own fully-formed planetary systems,
stars evolving into subgiants, giants, and even supergiants,
stars dying in planetary nebulae, supernovae, and other life-ending events,
and stellar remnants of now-extinct stars like white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.
We can trace back the history of our Universe a full 13.8 billion years, to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, measuring the star-formation rate all throughout our cosmic history.
It was a full 9.2 billion years after the hot Big Bang first began, or roughly 4.6 billion years ago, that our Sun and Solar System began forming in our own Milky Way: some 27,000 light-years from the galactic center. And now, all this time later, human beings have risen to prominence here on planet Earth, having reconstructed our cosmic history more successfully than ever before. One of the ... 
If the U.S. were only 100 people, this is what they’d believe: 63 are Christian, 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 have a non-Christian faith.
This graph maps those differences out into more specific categories, bringing blink-of-an-eye clarity to a complex topic. But it does not show changes over time. And those changes add critical context.
If Americans were 100 people, 63 would be Christian, 30 would be “nones”, and 7 would be adherents of non-Christian religions. (Credit: Ryan Burge on X)
The graph is based on the third of Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Studies. Taken together, they reveal a dramatic drop in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian: from 78% in 2007, 71% in 2014, and down to 63% in its latest survey (2023-24).
That last figure, however, seems to be holding steady since 2019. In other words, the decline of Christianity in America appears to have stabilized. Here’s a closer look at the losses since 2007:
Protestants made up half of the American population in 2007 — if only just 51%. By 2023-24, that share had declined to 40%.
Among Protestants, the ... 
An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable.
When faced with a difficult problem — and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is — it can help to work backward, reducing and excluding what doesn’t work until what’s left over is a decent approximation of favorable traits. Evolution works in similar ways, so thoroughly destroying what doesn’t work that what’s left over tends to work quite well. Or think about health: What foods are good for you is an endless debate, and no one who’s honest with the evidence can say they know the perfect diet. But what’s bad for you is much more settled. I have no idea if a glass of red wine is good for me. I am 100% sure that cigarettes are not.
A young boy once asked Charlie Munger, “What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in life?” Munger replied: “Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains to ...