Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, star formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation.
However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a star formed back at the beginning of the Universe should still be alive today. Of course, galaxies are messy places, and a far greater number of stars have formed since those early times, making the task of finding such a relic more challenging than even the classic needle-in-a-haystack problem.
Remarkably, by examining stars in ... Continue Reading »
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.
Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®
But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?
The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a ... Continue Reading »
“Who owns intelligence?”
Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it?
More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence.
While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also been used to deterministically sort people into groups and write off others entirely. Seeing injustice justified with IQ, educators grew increasingly fed up with the indicator in the second half of the 20th century. Such a narrow definition of intelligence simply didn’t comport with the range of cognitive abilities teachers observed in their students.
In this milieu, ... Continue Reading »
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.
This photograph, taken aboard the Apollo 8 mission and simply dubbed “Earthrise,” has often been called the most environmentally impactful photograph in human history. Its taker, Bill Anders, remarked, “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon, I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, ‘Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.'”
Credit: NASA/Apollo 8
In 1972, humans journeyed to the Moon for the 9th time: aboard Apollo 17.
The launch of Apollo 17, the 8th and final crewed mission ... Continue Reading »
When you think about the word “anxiety,” it likely comes with a negative connotation. But anxiety is a normal human emotion that nearly all of us experience. Reframing anxiety as a tool for change, adopting concepts from Zen Buddhism, and striving to live in a ‘flow state’ can quell the negative thoughts we experience and amplify your mind’s abilities.
Optimizing your brain so that you can work in harmony with your thoughts is entirely possible. These 3 experts explain how we can work with our physiology, rather than try to rebel against it.
Authors Steven Kotler and Wendy Suzuki along with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger show us how to optimize our mind, transform anxiety, and drop into ‘flow state’ for a more peaceful life.
This video is part of Big Think’s monthly issue The Roots of Resilience.
This video Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
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 particular, three main effects all can systematically shift light of any wavelength toward either redder or bluer wavelengths:
the relative motion of the emitting source and the receiving observer,
the changes in the gravitational field that the traveling signal experiences during its journey,
and the effects of either expansion or contraction of the spacetime through which the signal travels.
These three effects can lead to redshifts or blueshifts, depending on which direction they occur in, and it was long expected that they’d affect all waves, not just light waves, in a similar fashion. Now that we’re in the era of gravitational ... Continue Reading »
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.
Continue Reading »
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 largest private employer, has long been associated with low pay. In 2019, its voluntary company-wide minimum wage stood at $11 per hour, lagging behind competitors like Target and Costco. If paying jobs were truly easy to replace, one would expect Walmart jobs to be among the easier to quit and move on from, or market pressure would already have pushed Walmart wages to match those competitors.
To make an apples-to-apples comparison, here I focus on roughly 1,300 workers earning exactly $11 in states where that wage was legal (i.e., the state minimum wage was below $11). We asked these workers ... Continue Reading »
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 do so. Twelve of those travelers, on six independent missions, actually set foot on the lunar surface. Many artifacts have been left behind on the Moon during that time: flags, photographs, seismometers, mirrors, and even vehicles, while those same humans brought back rocks, dirt, and actual pieces of the Moon. (An autonomous sample return mission, from the lunar far side, was also conducted by China earlier this decade.)
Of everyone still alive today, fewer than 25% are old enough to have memories of these monumental moments in history: when ... Continue Reading »
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 recently deceased city. It is a multi-layered document of first contact, evidence of the hybridization of two clashing cultures as well as the dominance of one over the other.
Curiously, nobody knows who exactly made this map. The leading theory is that it was based on an indigenous chart of the city. Cortés had obtained from the Aztec emperor Montezuma a map of the coastline, so it seems plausible that a native cartographer provided a cartographic outline of the capital, too.
The map shows a city labelled Temixtitan built on islands in Lake Texcoco. Four causeways in the cardinal directions connect ... Continue Reading »
Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, star formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation.
However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a star formed back at the beginning of the Universe should still be alive today. Of course, galaxies are messy places, and a far greater number of stars have formed since those early times, making the task of finding such a relic more challenging than even the classic needle-in-a-haystack problem.
Remarkably, by examining stars in ... 
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.
Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®
But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?
The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a ... 
“Who owns intelligence?”
Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it?
More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence.
While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also been used to deterministically sort people into groups and write off others entirely. Seeing injustice justified with IQ, educators grew increasingly fed up with the indicator in the second half of the 20th century. Such a narrow definition of intelligence simply didn’t comport with the range of cognitive abilities teachers observed in their students.
In this milieu, ... 
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.
This photograph, taken aboard the Apollo 8 mission and simply dubbed “Earthrise,” has often been called the most environmentally impactful photograph in human history. Its taker, Bill Anders, remarked, “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon, I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, ‘Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.'”
Credit: NASA/Apollo 8
In 1972, humans journeyed to the Moon for the 9th time: aboard Apollo 17.
The launch of Apollo 17, the 8th and final crewed mission ... 
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 particular, three main effects all can systematically shift light of any wavelength toward either redder or bluer wavelengths:
the relative motion of the emitting source and the receiving observer,
the changes in the gravitational field that the traveling signal experiences during its journey,
and the effects of either expansion or contraction of the spacetime through which the signal travels.
These three effects can lead to redshifts or blueshifts, depending on which direction they occur in, and it was long expected that they’d affect all waves, not just light waves, in a similar fashion. Now that we’re in the era of gravitational ... 
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 largest private employer, has long been associated with low pay. In 2019, its voluntary company-wide minimum wage stood at $11 per hour, lagging behind competitors like Target and Costco. If paying jobs were truly easy to replace, one would expect Walmart jobs to be among the easier to quit and move on from, or market pressure would already have pushed Walmart wages to match those competitors.
To make an apples-to-apples comparison, here I focus on roughly 1,300 workers earning exactly $11 in states where that wage was legal (i.e., the state minimum wage was below $11). We asked these workers ... 
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 do so. Twelve of those travelers, on six independent missions, actually set foot on the lunar surface. Many artifacts have been left behind on the Moon during that time: flags, photographs, seismometers, mirrors, and even vehicles, while those same humans brought back rocks, dirt, and actual pieces of the Moon. (An autonomous sample return mission, from the lunar far side, was also conducted by China earlier this decade.)
Of everyone still alive today, fewer than 25% are old enough to have memories of these monumental moments in history: when ... 
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 recently deceased city. It is a multi-layered document of first contact, evidence of the hybridization of two clashing cultures as well as the dominance of one over the other.
Curiously, nobody knows who exactly made this map. The leading theory is that it was based on an indigenous chart of the city. Cortés had obtained from the Aztec emperor Montezuma a map of the coastline, so it seems plausible that a native cartographer provided a cartographic outline of the capital, too.
The map shows a city labelled Temixtitan built on islands in Lake Texcoco. Four causeways in the cardinal directions connect ...