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 »
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Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec breaks down why the traditional idea of mentorship is not only outdated, but actively getting in the way of your growth.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.
Continue Reading »
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 been found in favor of it. This was the fallacy that led to the rise of elegant, beautiful, and compelling scenarios — grand unification, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory — whose predictions simply don’t appear to match experimental reality in any measurable way.
The danger isn’t in having and developing an idea that’s speculative, but rather in believing in it so strongly that you reach for it as your go-to explanation whenever you see even a tiny hint that could potentially support it. This is the cognitive fallacy of motivated reasoning, and even theoretical physicists, particularly when armed with suggestive-but-inconclusive data, are susceptible ... Continue Reading »
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.
Continue Reading »
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 did it once before.
An epidemic of deadly fridges
The story of the Montreal Protocol starts, bizarrely, with an epidemic of deadly fridges in the 1920s. In those pioneer days of electric home refrigeration, everyone’s favorite new kitchen appliance relied on highly toxic, flammable, or corrosive gases to keep food chilled. A faulty compressor or leaky pipe could wipe out an entire family in their sleep, and in the first half of 1929, gas from fridges killed at least 15 people in Chicago alone.
Danger drove innovation, and in 1928, General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. synthesized ... Continue Reading »
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.
When it was finally my turn at the counter, I thanked him for the meticulousness he brought to his work and casually asked how business had been. Howard sighed. He smiled a weary smile and paused. “Where to start?” he said. Then he told me about 2020.
When the pandemic struck, dry cleaners were among the hardest-hit businesses in the country. It was a perfect storm of obsolescence. Offices shuttered and weddings were canceled. Between remote work and the sudden “Zoom-casual” dress code, the demand for pressed shirts and dry-cleaned suits ... Continue Reading »
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 abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap them. We do horrible things to these animals.” And just when we think we’ve won? “They rebound.”
No one wants to find rat droppings next to the Pop-Tarts in the pantry or hear the scritchings and scratchings of rats ... Continue Reading »
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, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... Continue Reading »
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 climber clutch at tiny crimps in the rock with substantially more ease. The addition or subtraction of mere millimeters on the hand could mean the difference between struggling with an intermediate climb at your local bouldering gym and pioneering an untouched route along some precipitous wall in any far-flung corner of the world.
There is, however, another trait worth mentioning, one perhaps even more foundational to the literal and metaphorical heights of professional rock climbing. It’s a quality that cannot be as easily quantified by a tape measure or an MRI or any suite of blood tests. ... Continue Reading »
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 still incredibly high. With every extra kilogram of payload adding to mission costs, astronauts are severely limited in what they can bring. “The whole idea of bricks and cinder blocks isn’t going to fly,” says Jim Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who played an integral role in NASA’s Apollo program.
What could fly, though? Fungi.
A resilient resource
If asked to identify the fungi in a forest, most people would likely point to the mushrooms they see popping out from the soil. But the main part of a fungus is actually its mycelium, a tangled, cobweb-like structure that permeates the forest’s leaf ... 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 ... 
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 been found in favor of it. This was the fallacy that led to the rise of elegant, beautiful, and compelling scenarios — grand unification, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory — whose predictions simply don’t appear to match experimental reality in any measurable way.
The danger isn’t in having and developing an idea that’s speculative, but rather in believing in it so strongly that you reach for it as your go-to explanation whenever you see even a tiny hint that could potentially support it. This is the cognitive fallacy of motivated reasoning, and even theoretical physicists, particularly when armed with suggestive-but-inconclusive data, are susceptible ... 
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 did it once before.
An epidemic of deadly fridges
The story of the Montreal Protocol starts, bizarrely, with an epidemic of deadly fridges in the 1920s. In those pioneer days of electric home refrigeration, everyone’s favorite new kitchen appliance relied on highly toxic, flammable, or corrosive gases to keep food chilled. A faulty compressor or leaky pipe could wipe out an entire family in their sleep, and in the first half of 1929, gas from fridges killed at least 15 people in Chicago alone.
Danger drove innovation, and in 1928, General Motors engineer Thomas Midgley Jr. synthesized ... 
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.
When it was finally my turn at the counter, I thanked him for the meticulousness he brought to his work and casually asked how business had been. Howard sighed. He smiled a weary smile and paused. “Where to start?” he said. Then he told me about 2020.
When the pandemic struck, dry cleaners were among the hardest-hit businesses in the country. It was a perfect storm of obsolescence. Offices shuttered and weddings were canceled. Between remote work and the sudden “Zoom-casual” dress code, the demand for pressed shirts and dry-cleaned suits ... 
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 abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap them. We do horrible things to these animals.” And just when we think we’ve won? “They rebound.”
No one wants to find rat droppings next to the Pop-Tarts in the pantry or hear the scritchings and scratchings of rats ... 
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, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freudian death drive. Or perhaps he’s just a boy who likes whacking things.
Now, I don’t really care about flowers. They’re pretty enough, and the world is undeniably better for their existence, but one rose is just as sweet as all the others, ... 
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 climber clutch at tiny crimps in the rock with substantially more ease. The addition or subtraction of mere millimeters on the hand could mean the difference between struggling with an intermediate climb at your local bouldering gym and pioneering an untouched route along some precipitous wall in any far-flung corner of the world.
There is, however, another trait worth mentioning, one perhaps even more foundational to the literal and metaphorical heights of professional rock climbing. It’s a quality that cannot be as easily quantified by a tape measure or an MRI or any suite of blood tests. ... 
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 still incredibly high. With every extra kilogram of payload adding to mission costs, astronauts are severely limited in what they can bring. “The whole idea of bricks and cinder blocks isn’t going to fly,” says Jim Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who played an integral role in NASA’s Apollo program.
What could fly, though? Fungi.
A resilient resource
If asked to identify the fungi in a forest, most people would likely point to the mushrooms they see popping out from the soil. But the main part of a fungus is actually its mycelium, a tangled, cobweb-like structure that permeates the forest’s leaf ...