Could solar energy be the key to unlocking a future free from fossil fuels and extreme poverty? Casey Handmer, founder and CEO of Terraform Industries, believes so. His company is pioneering technology that could revolutionize how we produce and consume energy, potentially solving climate change and global energy inequality in one fell swoop.
Terraform Industries is developing machines that create synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. It sounds like science fiction, but the technology is rooted in simple chemistry and powered by the rapidly advancing field of solar energy.
But Handmer’s vision extends beyond just replacing fossil fuels. He sees solar energy as the catalyst for a new era of human progress. By providing cheap, abundant energy to every corner of the globe, we could potentially eliminate extreme poverty within our lifetimes. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that Handmer believes we have a responsibility to pursue.
This video The solar revolution turning sunlight into synthetic fuel is featured on Big Think.
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The most pivotal turning point of what would become known as the General American accent was the willingness of the Quakers to share the New World with others from the outset. Early on, the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley alongside a community of Swedes and Finns, who had been part of the New Sweden colony, which had been captured by the Dutch and absorbed into the New Netherland colony. That colony, in turn, ended up being taken over by the British in 1664, who also stuck a “new” moniker (as in New York) on their recently acquired piece of New World heaven.
As settlement of the middle colonies hit its full stride, the diversity of new arrivals and the contact among them appears to have led to a leveling of features to an even greater degree than that occurring elsewhere. Why? Brotherly love, my friend. Unlike the Puritans, who were pretty picky about who settled amongst them, and the Virginians, who were pretty picky about who deserved grants of land, the Quakers were welcoming to all — and come all they ... Continue Reading »
Over the last 15 years, data on ancient DNA has upended the old story of human history. In this full-length interview, geneticist David Reich explains how new findings have challenged the family tree model of ancestry and revealed a past shaped by migration, interbreeding, disappearance, and constant change.
From Neanderthals and Denisovans to the myths of purity that still shape modern identity, Reich shows how the last decade of research has rewritten what we thought we knew about human origins. The result is a much stranger, more dynamic picture of the human story, one that forces us to rethink ancestry, evolution, and the deep history of who we are.
This video Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are is featured on Big Think.
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If you take everything we know of and can directly observe in the Universe — stars, stellar remnants, galaxies, gas, dust, plasma, and black holes — we find that it’s insufficient to explain what we see on the grandest of all cosmic scales. Unless you hypothesize some novel form of matter, something that’s not included in the Standard Model of elementary particles, you cannot explain a whole suite of evidence. This includes:
the abundances of the light elements and isotopes found in the most pristine environments,
the temperature (and polarization) fluctuation patterns found in the cosmic microwave background,
the correlations between distant galaxies imprinted in the Universe’s large-scale structure,
and astrophysical systems, like colliding galaxies and galaxy clusters at high speeds, where gravitational effects are observed to separate from the locations of normal matter.
Luckily, there’s a single addition (or modification) to the Universe’s contents that we can make to explain all of these and more: dark matter. However, dark matter has yet to be directly detected through the experimental attempts we know how to conduct. Even though its properties may ultimately render it fundamentally ... Continue Reading »
Wherever star-formation happens, a classic cosmic story unfolds.
A spiral galaxy typically consists of four main gaseous regions within the disk: diffuse atomic gas, dense molecular gas, stars and star clusters, and ionized regions of matter arising from energy injections from star-forming regions, young stars, and stellar cataclysms. JWST, along with the other PHANGS data sources, helps reveal different aspects of this life cycle, but once a galaxy’s gas is gone and no new gas reservoirs fall inside, star-formation ends permanently.
Credit: PHANGS collaboration, Design: Daniela Leitner
Initially, a massive cloud of gas contracts under its own gravity.
This amateur astronomy image of dark nebula LDN 1551 showcases the cloud of ionized gas within it: Sharpless 239. Many protostars, surrounded by dusty disks, are located inside, along with numerous Herbig-Haro objects, as the gas cloud has regions within it that have already internally fragmented and heated up, forming protostars and even early full-fledged stars in the process.
Credit: KK_Astro/Kaptàs Attila
Internal gas molecules radiate heat away, enabling further shrinking.
Within the plane of the Milky Way, dark dust lanes are omnipresent, representing dense neutral gas clouds usually ... Continue Reading »
Here in our Universe, there were many profound steps that needed to occur in order for creatures like humans to be able to arise. We needed to forge heavy elements in previous generations of stars: elements that the Universe wasn’t born with, but that are required to enable molecules that can link up to form complex bonds and macroscopic structures. We needed enough of those elements so that when new stars formed, rocky planets could arise around them. And we needed enough time to pass so that life could not only arise, but thrive and evolve to give rise to highly differentiated organisms. Some 4.5 billion years after the formation of planet Earth, here we are, asking and answering many profound aspects of one of the grandest questions of all: how did we get here?
Many variants of these grand questions often arise when we engage our curiosity. Where did we come from? What enabled our existence? What path did the Universe take to give rise to us? At just three years old, this week’s inquiry — exactly in line with ... Continue Reading »
Most people are trying to solve the wrong problem, optimizing for happiness when happiness isn’t actually a goal, it’s a byproduct. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues that the entire self-help industry has been selling ephemeral highs: affirmations, visualizations, the relentless pursuit of feeling good. The research doesn’t support it, and more importantly, neither does lived experience.
This video Your suffering is a compass. Here’s how to read it. is featured on Big Think.
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“I think it could be claimed,” Morris wrote in a late unpublished fragment, “that during the second half of the twentieth century I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of the time. As I experienced all this first as a man, then as a woman, it might also be said (although I wouldn’t want to make much of this) that my viewpoint was unique.”
The contradictions and anomalies that kept on coming only made her life more alluring. She preached the virtues of kindness, but after she died her daughter revealed unspeakable parental cruelty; she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary, yet I began to discern — and this surprised me — that her life reveals much that is universal. About addiction, for example: Morris was addicted to writing — to the creative process as a means of filling the void, or ... Continue Reading »
Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels coherent and fixed, even though modern science suggests that it’s continually shaped by pre-existing beliefs and experience. Seeing the construction clearly is the first step toward altering it.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
This video How your brain builds and edits your identity is featured on Big Think.
... Continue Reading »
If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all objects with mass or energy. Alternatively, they’ll list any other force that occurs between atoms on Earth, all of which are some manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Either:
there’s an attractive force between two particles with mass-or-energy, as in gravitation,
or there’s an attractive or repulsive force between systems of charged particles either at rest or in motion, as in electromagnetism.
But those are only two of the four fundamental forces (at least, we think there are only four) known to physicists today. The other two forces, however, are arguably at least as important for creating the collections of matter and energy that exist in the Universe: the nuclear forces. After all, the nuclear forces are required to determine the atomic number of every atom: the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus. That’s the ... Continue Reading »
The most pivotal turning point of what would become known as the General American accent was the willingness of the Quakers to share the New World with others from the outset. Early on, the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley alongside a community of Swedes and Finns, who had been part of the New Sweden colony, which had been captured by the Dutch and absorbed into the New Netherland colony. That colony, in turn, ended up being taken over by the British in 1664, who also stuck a “new” moniker (as in New York) on their recently acquired piece of New World heaven.
As settlement of the middle colonies hit its full stride, the diversity of new arrivals and the contact among them appears to have led to a leveling of features to an even greater degree than that occurring elsewhere. Why? Brotherly love, my friend. Unlike the Puritans, who were pretty picky about who settled amongst them, and the Virginians, who were pretty picky about who deserved grants of land, the Quakers were welcoming to all — and come all they ... 
If you take everything we know of and can directly observe in the Universe — stars, stellar remnants, galaxies, gas, dust, plasma, and black holes — we find that it’s insufficient to explain what we see on the grandest of all cosmic scales. Unless you hypothesize some novel form of matter, something that’s not included in the Standard Model of elementary particles, you cannot explain a whole suite of evidence. This includes:
the abundances of the light elements and isotopes found in the most pristine environments,
the temperature (and polarization) fluctuation patterns found in the cosmic microwave background,
the correlations between distant galaxies imprinted in the Universe’s large-scale structure,
and astrophysical systems, like colliding galaxies and galaxy clusters at high speeds, where gravitational effects are observed to separate from the locations of normal matter.
Luckily, there’s a single addition (or modification) to the Universe’s contents that we can make to explain all of these and more: dark matter. However, dark matter has yet to be directly detected through the experimental attempts we know how to conduct. Even though its properties may ultimately render it fundamentally ... 
Wherever star-formation happens, a classic cosmic story unfolds.
A spiral galaxy typically consists of four main gaseous regions within the disk: diffuse atomic gas, dense molecular gas, stars and star clusters, and ionized regions of matter arising from energy injections from star-forming regions, young stars, and stellar cataclysms. JWST, along with the other PHANGS data sources, helps reveal different aspects of this life cycle, but once a galaxy’s gas is gone and no new gas reservoirs fall inside, star-formation ends permanently.
Credit: PHANGS collaboration, Design: Daniela Leitner
Initially, a massive cloud of gas contracts under its own gravity.
This amateur astronomy image of dark nebula LDN 1551 showcases the cloud of ionized gas within it: Sharpless 239. Many protostars, surrounded by dusty disks, are located inside, along with numerous Herbig-Haro objects, as the gas cloud has regions within it that have already internally fragmented and heated up, forming protostars and even early full-fledged stars in the process.
Credit: KK_Astro/Kaptàs Attila
Internal gas molecules radiate heat away, enabling further shrinking.
Within the plane of the Milky Way, dark dust lanes are omnipresent, representing dense neutral gas clouds usually ... 
Here in our Universe, there were many profound steps that needed to occur in order for creatures like humans to be able to arise. We needed to forge heavy elements in previous generations of stars: elements that the Universe wasn’t born with, but that are required to enable molecules that can link up to form complex bonds and macroscopic structures. We needed enough of those elements so that when new stars formed, rocky planets could arise around them. And we needed enough time to pass so that life could not only arise, but thrive and evolve to give rise to highly differentiated organisms. Some 4.5 billion years after the formation of planet Earth, here we are, asking and answering many profound aspects of one of the grandest questions of all: how did we get here?
Many variants of these grand questions often arise when we engage our curiosity. Where did we come from? What enabled our existence? What path did the Universe take to give rise to us? At just three years old, this week’s inquiry — exactly in line with ... 
“I think it could be claimed,” Morris wrote in a late unpublished fragment, “that during the second half of the twentieth century I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of the time. As I experienced all this first as a man, then as a woman, it might also be said (although I wouldn’t want to make much of this) that my viewpoint was unique.”
The contradictions and anomalies that kept on coming only made her life more alluring. She preached the virtues of kindness, but after she died her daughter revealed unspeakable parental cruelty; she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary, yet I began to discern — and this surprised me — that her life reveals much that is universal. About addiction, for example: Morris was addicted to writing — to the creative process as a means of filling the void, or ... 
If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all objects with mass or energy. Alternatively, they’ll list any other force that occurs between atoms on Earth, all of which are some manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Either:
there’s an attractive force between two particles with mass-or-energy, as in gravitation,
or there’s an attractive or repulsive force between systems of charged particles either at rest or in motion, as in electromagnetism.
But those are only two of the four fundamental forces (at least, we think there are only four) known to physicists today. The other two forces, however, are arguably at least as important for creating the collections of matter and energy that exist in the Universe: the nuclear forces. After all, the nuclear forces are required to determine the atomic number of every atom: the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus. That’s the ...