Christof Koch smiles as he recalls a 2025 WIRED piece he recently read. Journalist Sam Apple spent a weekend at a remote Airbnb retreat with three couples, exploring the nature of their romantic relationships. In the analog world, however, there were only four people present: the journalist and three human partners. Their counterparts — Xia, Lucas, and Aaron — were digital avatars, at once present and absent. “It’s so weird,” Koch tells Big Think. “They sit around introducing their partners. Then they take photos so the AI can see who they’re with. And afterward they go off and talk secretly with their avatar.”
If you press such people, Koch adds, they will concede the obvious: “Yes, I know they aren’t real.” Yet that recognition can quickly dissolve in the heat of the interaction. Koch sees a resemblance to a rare clinical condition known as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead and that their insides are rotting. Cut off from the body’s signals, they lose the felt sense of being alive. “When you point out, ‘but you can talk,’ ... Continue Reading »
Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors. But marine mammals surface for air. Seagrasses often live entirely submerged. Why did they take the plunge, turning their back on the land to become sea creatures? The world’s continents are fringed by vast expanses of sand and mud. Until seagrasses came along, no plant or seaweed could grow for long in such shifting, unstable conditions. Seagrasses brought to these sea bottoms buried creeping stems, strong roots, and pliable leaves. Not only could seagrasses tolerate this oozy, muddy habitat, they built more of it.
Alongside their sinewy body form, the ancestors of seagrass carried with them from dry land two useful features that no sea creature possessed. The first is flowers, the second a molecule, lignin. To these useful inheritances from their land ancestors, seagrasses added a suite of innovations that helped them to thrive in the salty, wave-pounded margins of the oceans.
Seagrass flowers are perhaps the most visually underwhelming blooms in ... Continue Reading »
War is hell. But war is also geometry. And geometry can be quite beautiful. Prime examples of that disturbing paradox are the so-called star forts that proliferated throughout Renaissance Europe.
Seen from above, these bastioned fortifications resemble elaborate ornamental diagrams, or perhaps even sacred mandalas. Yet their snowflake-like beauty was unintended. These were machines of war, developed from a mathematical attempt to solve a practical military problem: how to defend an army or a city from enemy artillery.
Typical star-shaped fortification from Jean Errard’s influential 1596 treatise. (Credit: Jean Errard, public domain)
Foundational to fortification theory was Jean Errard’s 1594 treatise La fortification réduicte en art et démonstrée, in which the French mathematician and engineer used geometry to formalize military architecture, helping to transform fort-building from a traditional craft into a discipline grounded in mathematics.
The resulting star forts (so called because of their multiple fortified extrusions) solved a technological crisis. Medieval fortresses, built to withstand ladders, catapults, and siege engines, were no match for gunpowder-powered artillery, the 15th century’s major military innovation. A cannon could easily take out vertical masonry walls that had ... Continue Reading »
Whenever you have a Universe like ours — governed by general relativity and full of different types of energy — there are many different possible outcomes. Your Universe could tear itself apart, driving objects away from one another faster and faster, with no limit in sight: a Big Rip. Your Universe could expand forever, leading to an eventual cold, empty fate. Your Universe could exist in perfect harmony, where the expansion rate drops to zero, but never reverses course and recollapses. Or your Universe could reach a maximum size, begin contracting, and eventually meet its demise in a catastrophic Big Crunch.
However, despite the wildly different possibilities that reflect your Universe’s ultimate cosmic future, there’s only one major factor that determines that fate: the sum total of all the different forms of energy present in your Universe, and how it compares to the initial expansion rate. For a long time, we thought that measuring the curvature of the Universe would reveal the answer to that question, but all of that changed with the discovery of dark energy. So how does dark ... Continue Reading »
Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results.
Linden also explores the rising GLP-1 drugs, their effects on addiction, and why they don’t work forever.
This video The science behind the strangest biological phenomena is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help.
This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastically agreed that helping others was appropriate and often obligatory, but altruistic acts were focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — family, friends, and, less frequently, others “like us” in the same community. The sense that anyone ... Continue Reading »
Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation.
Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.
This video The real lesson from the first time globalization died is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no matter of any type:
no normal matter,
no dark matter,
no stars,
no galaxies,
no plasma,
no gas,
no dust,
no black holes,
and no anything else.
There’s also no radiation emerging from it at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes.
At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions at all. There is no hole in the Universe; the closest we have are the underdense regions known as cosmic voids, which still contain matter. Moreover, this image isn’t a void or hole at all, but a cloud of light-blocking neutral gas, made simply of plain old collections of atoms. Let’s do the ... Continue Reading »
When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredible talent and creativity in the moment drove many breakthroughs. But as Tesla grew, the whole team began to define an entire operating system that emphasized speed and simplicity. The objective: exponential growth. Elon called this formula “the Algorithm.”
To survive in the twenty-first century, older companies need growth and efficiency just as much as anyone. The steps of the Algorithm can lead to dramatic improvement in speed and quality, even in the most venerable enterprises.
Consider General Motors. The century-old behemoth has a reputation, gained over the decades, for running a rigid hierarchy and resisting change. In the 1980s the entrepreneur Ross Perot bought a piece of the company, joined the board, and vowed to modernize it. He later lamented that modernizing GM was “like teaching an elephant to tap dance.”
In 2022 ... Continue Reading »
Within the span of a single generation, nearly every major civilization in the Mediterranean world collapsed simultaneously: the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the great palace cities of Cyprus and the Levant.
What is even more consequential than the age that preceeded it is what came next: a 400-year period that shaped the world as we know it today.
This video The collapse that accidentally built the modern world is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Christof Koch smiles as he recalls a 2025 WIRED piece he recently read. Journalist Sam Apple spent a weekend at a remote Airbnb retreat with three couples, exploring the nature of their romantic relationships. In the analog world, however, there were only four people present: the journalist and three human partners. Their counterparts — Xia, Lucas, and Aaron — were digital avatars, at once present and absent. “It’s so weird,” Koch tells Big Think. “They sit around introducing their partners. Then they take photos so the AI can see who they’re with. And afterward they go off and talk secretly with their avatar.”
If you press such people, Koch adds, they will concede the obvious: “Yes, I know they aren’t real.” Yet that recognition can quickly dissolve in the heat of the interaction. Koch sees a resemblance to a rare clinical condition known as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead and that their insides are rotting. Cut off from the body’s signals, they lose the felt sense of being alive. “When you point out, ‘but you can talk,’ ... 
Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors. But marine mammals surface for air. Seagrasses often live entirely submerged. Why did they take the plunge, turning their back on the land to become sea creatures? The world’s continents are fringed by vast expanses of sand and mud. Until seagrasses came along, no plant or seaweed could grow for long in such shifting, unstable conditions. Seagrasses brought to these sea bottoms buried creeping stems, strong roots, and pliable leaves. Not only could seagrasses tolerate this oozy, muddy habitat, they built more of it.
Alongside their sinewy body form, the ancestors of seagrass carried with them from dry land two useful features that no sea creature possessed. The first is flowers, the second a molecule, lignin. To these useful inheritances from their land ancestors, seagrasses added a suite of innovations that helped them to thrive in the salty, wave-pounded margins of the oceans.
Seagrass flowers are perhaps the most visually underwhelming blooms in ... 
War is hell. But war is also geometry. And geometry can be quite beautiful. Prime examples of that disturbing paradox are the so-called star forts that proliferated throughout Renaissance Europe.
Seen from above, these bastioned fortifications resemble elaborate ornamental diagrams, or perhaps even sacred mandalas. Yet their snowflake-like beauty was unintended. These were machines of war, developed from a mathematical attempt to solve a practical military problem: how to defend an army or a city from enemy artillery.
Typical star-shaped fortification from Jean Errard’s influential 1596 treatise. (Credit: Jean Errard, public domain)
Foundational to fortification theory was Jean Errard’s 1594 treatise La fortification réduicte en art et démonstrée, in which the French mathematician and engineer used geometry to formalize military architecture, helping to transform fort-building from a traditional craft into a discipline grounded in mathematics.
The resulting star forts (so called because of their multiple fortified extrusions) solved a technological crisis. Medieval fortresses, built to withstand ladders, catapults, and siege engines, were no match for gunpowder-powered artillery, the 15th century’s major military innovation. A cannon could easily take out vertical masonry walls that had ... 
Whenever you have a Universe like ours — governed by general relativity and full of different types of energy — there are many different possible outcomes. Your Universe could tear itself apart, driving objects away from one another faster and faster, with no limit in sight: a Big Rip. Your Universe could expand forever, leading to an eventual cold, empty fate. Your Universe could exist in perfect harmony, where the expansion rate drops to zero, but never reverses course and recollapses. Or your Universe could reach a maximum size, begin contracting, and eventually meet its demise in a catastrophic Big Crunch.
However, despite the wildly different possibilities that reflect your Universe’s ultimate cosmic future, there’s only one major factor that determines that fate: the sum total of all the different forms of energy present in your Universe, and how it compares to the initial expansion rate. For a long time, we thought that measuring the curvature of the Universe would reveal the answer to that question, but all of that changed with the discovery of dark energy. So how does dark ... 
Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help.
This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastically agreed that helping others was appropriate and often obligatory, but altruistic acts were focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — family, friends, and, less frequently, others “like us” in the same community. The sense that anyone ... 
Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no matter of any type:
no normal matter,
no dark matter,
no stars,
no galaxies,
no plasma,
no gas,
no dust,
no black holes,
and no anything else.
There’s also no radiation emerging from it at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes.
At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions at all. There is no hole in the Universe; the closest we have are the underdense regions known as cosmic voids, which still contain matter. Moreover, this image isn’t a void or hole at all, but a cloud of light-blocking neutral gas, made simply of plain old collections of atoms. Let’s do the ... 
When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredible talent and creativity in the moment drove many breakthroughs. But as Tesla grew, the whole team began to define an entire operating system that emphasized speed and simplicity. The objective: exponential growth. Elon called this formula “the Algorithm.”
To survive in the twenty-first century, older companies need growth and efficiency just as much as anyone. The steps of the Algorithm can lead to dramatic improvement in speed and quality, even in the most venerable enterprises.
Consider General Motors. The century-old behemoth has a reputation, gained over the decades, for running a rigid hierarchy and resisting change. In the 1980s the entrepreneur Ross Perot bought a piece of the company, joined the board, and vowed to modernize it. He later lamented that modernizing GM was “like teaching an elephant to tap dance.”
In 2022 ...