Within the Milky Way, ancient relics still persist.
There are slightly over 150 globular clusters identified within 200,000 light-years of the galactic center, with an additional five or six to be found if we double the radius of this search. While most formed along with the Milky Way, a substantial fraction did not, and were brought in at later times when smaller galaxies, such as the Kraken and Gaia-Enceladus, were devoured and cannibalized.
Credit: Larry McNish/RASC Calgary
Over 150 globular clusters exist within our galaxy’s disk, bulge, and halo.
This image shows Euclid’s high-resolution view of globular cluster NGC 6397: only 7800 light-years from Earth, here in our own Milky Way. This object, like many globular clusters within our Milky Way, is close enough that our best observatories can resolve the individual stars within it, even close to the central regions. If intermediate mass black holes are present within them, the closest globular clusters are the best candidates for finding them, with 2024 research providing strong evidence for one inside Omega Centauri.
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC ... Continue Reading »
Early in my career, I landed a job at a local newspaper. It was a small-town daily with one editor and three reporters, and I only took the position because I was fresh out of college, and it paid 25 cents more an hour than my gig at the take-and-bake pizzeria. Looking back, I’m not nostalgic for the crushing grind or the strangely personalized abuse the paper’s readers could hurl over a simple spelling error. But if you caught me in a sentimental mood, I would admit that the experience ingrained in me an appreciation for good journalism and a love of the printed word.
So, in some ways, reading Empire of Ink felt like tracing my professional roots.
Alex Wright’s delightful history chronicles the evolution of the American newspaper, from its colonial origins to the turn of the 20th century. During this roughly one-and-a-quarter-century stretch, the country’s news landscape was a far cry from today’s middle-class profession. Our button-up permutation — with its standards, press passes, and structured prose — was organized by corporations and magnates who transformed the country’s legion ... Continue Reading »
In the era of space telescopes, we’re now used to clear, sharp images where everything is focused pristinely: reaching the theoretical maximum that’s possible based on the wavelength of light that’s being observed and the diameter of the telescope’s primary mirror. First with Hubble (once the flaw in its primary mirror was corrected) and later with space telescopes such as Spitzer, GALEX, Herschel, and now JWST, the lack of an atmosphere to contend with means that all we need to do is make our optical systems as optimized as possible in the vacuum of space, and we’ll get those ideal images. Of course, that involves:
keeping that telescope stable,
keeping it pointed correctly,
and keeping it focused correctly,
even as the telescope moves, rotates, and deals with external influences like radiation from the Sun.
How, then, do telescopes and telescope operators accomplish this? That’s what Jim Wilson wants to know, as he writes in to ask:
“How do space telescopes focus and stay focused? For example, on an object close by or an object far away, with near and far being relative, or on one object ... Continue Reading »
A retired Japanese engineer once memorized pi to over 111,000 digits using nothing but storytelling and visualization. He also forgot his wife’s birthday that same year.
Neuroscientist Lisa Genova uses this contradiction to dispel a persistent collective fear: that ordinary forgetting is an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s.
This video A neuroscientist’s guide to protecting your brain, in 58 minutes is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
It is a privilege to be antisocial.
Let’s go back 10,000 years and check in on humanity. While a few communities around the Fertile Crescent have decided it’s a good idea to stay put and grow plants, most people are free-roaming citizens of nowhere. Humans are a nomadic, pack-based species that travel in groups of roughly 20 to 50, hunting animals and gathering wild food. Summers mean long days hunting and preparing because winters are cold, hungry, and dangerous.
The clans, tribes, and families roam the landscape, helping each other out. Give Clive a bit of rest, he’s broken his toe. Let Erica have a bigger cut of deer; she’s just found out she’s pregnant. Everyone helps each other because that’s what you do when it’s you against the world. In the Neolithic world of yesterday, people often tried to be prosocial.
Except for Ralph. Ralph is an unquestionable asshole. He hides extra food in his sack, and he cried with laughter when Clive dropped that rock on his toe. “It’s your own fault for getting pregnant,” he tells Erica, as he claws ... Continue Reading »
Billiards is a sinful game. An indulgence of lowlifes and reckless gamblers. Everybody knew that in 1826, or they did if they read that year’s June 2 issue of the Richmond Enquirer. It was here that editor Thomas Ritchie informed his readers of how Congressman Samuel Carson took to the floor during a debate over appropriating $14,000 for furnishing the White House to denounce the president’s use of public funds to create a gambling den within its hallowed walls!
To quote the gentleman from North Carolina:
Is it possible, Mr. Chairman, to believe, that it ever was intended by congress, that the public money should be applied to the purchase of gambling tables and gambling furniture? And if it is right to purchase billiard tables and chessmen, why not purchase, also, pharo banks, playing cards, race horses, and every other necessary article to complete a system of gambling at the president’s palace, and let it at once be understood by the people that this is a most splendid gambling administration?
Mr. Chairman, such conduct in the chief magistrate of this nation, is enough ... Continue Reading »
What if enlightenment is not a permanent state, but a habit we regularly return to? Andrew Newberg, MD, Robert Waldinger, MD, and Jim Al-Khalili, PhD, explore how moments of awe, unity, and insight can alter the brain and reshape our sense of reality. From neuroscience to Zen practice to the limits of scientific knowledge, they argue that enlightenment may be less about arriving somewhere and more about how we act once we feel connected.
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 What science reveals about the ‘magic’ of enlightenment is featured on Big Think.
... Continue Reading »
If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate the Universe in a way that compelled nature itself to provide the answers to your deepest questions in a fashion that was comprehensible to you. When any two quanta of energy interact — irrespective of their properties, including whether they’re particles or antiparticles, massive or massless, fermions or bosons, etc. — the result of that interaction has the potential to inform you about the underlying laws and rules that the system has to obey. If you can know:
all the possible outcomes of any interaction,
including what their relative probabilities were,
and can validate your theoretical model by matching it up with the experimental/observational data you collect,
then and only then can you claim to have some understanding of what was going on. Being quantitative in precisely this fashion, asking not only “what happens” but also “by how much” and “how often,” is what makes physics the robust science that it is.
Quite surprisingly, everything that we know about the Universe can, in some way, be traced back to the ... Continue Reading »
If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, you’ve certainly heard of them — if not in school, then on Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Composed by the second-century Roman emperor in his tent on nights between long marches and bloody battles, they’re one of the foundational texts of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that first emerged around 300 B.C., and which has recently found an unlikely second life on social media.
Stoicism’s modern-day resurgence has been traced back to viral marketing executive turned self-help author Ryan Holiday’s 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, which introduced snippets of Meditations to professional athletes and Silicon Valley elite. Other books from Holiday — including The Daily Stoic, which spawned a popular newsletter of the same name — followed suit, as did numerous copycats. Finding audiences outside college campuses, new editions of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and Epictetus’ Discourses also became bestsellers.
Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, isn’t surprised at Stoicism’s newfound popularity. A lot of Stoic ideas and ... Continue Reading »
All across the Universe, we can learn what stars are made of simply by taking a spectrum of the light coming from them. While some stars are low in what astronomers call metallicity — the fraction of elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium — and others have high metallicities, the ratios of the heavy elements inside of them are normally fairly consistent. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe; carbon is fourth, followed by neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron, and sulfur rounding out the top 10. By measuring the strength of the absorption lines coming from these elements, we can determine their abundances: relative to hydrogen and relative to each other.
This is true for stars like our Sun, and it’s also true for the remnants of stars like our Sun: white dwarf stars. Every once in a while, however, a star or stellar remnant will encounter an object — a planet, moon, asteroid, or comet — and devour it. When it does, the elements from that object get smeared out across the surface of that ... Continue Reading »
Within the Milky Way, ancient relics still persist.
There are slightly over 150 globular clusters identified within 200,000 light-years of the galactic center, with an additional five or six to be found if we double the radius of this search. While most formed along with the Milky Way, a substantial fraction did not, and were brought in at later times when smaller galaxies, such as the Kraken and Gaia-Enceladus, were devoured and cannibalized.
Credit: Larry McNish/RASC Calgary
Over 150 globular clusters exist within our galaxy’s disk, bulge, and halo.
This image shows Euclid’s high-resolution view of globular cluster NGC 6397: only 7800 light-years from Earth, here in our own Milky Way. This object, like many globular clusters within our Milky Way, is close enough that our best observatories can resolve the individual stars within it, even close to the central regions. If intermediate mass black holes are present within them, the closest globular clusters are the best candidates for finding them, with 2024 research providing strong evidence for one inside Omega Centauri.
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC ... 
Early in my career, I landed a job at a local newspaper. It was a small-town daily with one editor and three reporters, and I only took the position because I was fresh out of college, and it paid 25 cents more an hour than my gig at the take-and-bake pizzeria. Looking back, I’m not nostalgic for the crushing grind or the strangely personalized abuse the paper’s readers could hurl over a simple spelling error. But if you caught me in a sentimental mood, I would admit that the experience ingrained in me an appreciation for good journalism and a love of the printed word.
So, in some ways, reading Empire of Ink felt like tracing my professional roots.
Alex Wright’s delightful history chronicles the evolution of the American newspaper, from its colonial origins to the turn of the 20th century. During this roughly one-and-a-quarter-century stretch, the country’s news landscape was a far cry from today’s middle-class profession. Our button-up permutation — with its standards, press passes, and structured prose — was organized by corporations and magnates who transformed the country’s legion ... 
In the era of space telescopes, we’re now used to clear, sharp images where everything is focused pristinely: reaching the theoretical maximum that’s possible based on the wavelength of light that’s being observed and the diameter of the telescope’s primary mirror. First with Hubble (once the flaw in its primary mirror was corrected) and later with space telescopes such as Spitzer, GALEX, Herschel, and now JWST, the lack of an atmosphere to contend with means that all we need to do is make our optical systems as optimized as possible in the vacuum of space, and we’ll get those ideal images. Of course, that involves:
keeping that telescope stable,
keeping it pointed correctly,
and keeping it focused correctly,
even as the telescope moves, rotates, and deals with external influences like radiation from the Sun.
How, then, do telescopes and telescope operators accomplish this? That’s what Jim Wilson wants to know, as he writes in to ask:
“How do space telescopes focus and stay focused? For example, on an object close by or an object far away, with near and far being relative, or on one object ... 
It is a privilege to be antisocial.
Let’s go back 10,000 years and check in on humanity. While a few communities around the Fertile Crescent have decided it’s a good idea to stay put and grow plants, most people are free-roaming citizens of nowhere. Humans are a nomadic, pack-based species that travel in groups of roughly 20 to 50, hunting animals and gathering wild food. Summers mean long days hunting and preparing because winters are cold, hungry, and dangerous.
The clans, tribes, and families roam the landscape, helping each other out. Give Clive a bit of rest, he’s broken his toe. Let Erica have a bigger cut of deer; she’s just found out she’s pregnant. Everyone helps each other because that’s what you do when it’s you against the world. In the Neolithic world of yesterday, people often tried to be prosocial.
Except for Ralph. Ralph is an unquestionable asshole. He hides extra food in his sack, and he cried with laughter when Clive dropped that rock on his toe. “It’s your own fault for getting pregnant,” he tells Erica, as he claws ... 
Billiards is a sinful game. An indulgence of lowlifes and reckless gamblers. Everybody knew that in 1826, or they did if they read that year’s June 2 issue of the Richmond Enquirer. It was here that editor Thomas Ritchie informed his readers of how Congressman Samuel Carson took to the floor during a debate over appropriating $14,000 for furnishing the White House to denounce the president’s use of public funds to create a gambling den within its hallowed walls!
To quote the gentleman from North Carolina:
Is it possible, Mr. Chairman, to believe, that it ever was intended by congress, that the public money should be applied to the purchase of gambling tables and gambling furniture? And if it is right to purchase billiard tables and chessmen, why not purchase, also, pharo banks, playing cards, race horses, and every other necessary article to complete a system of gambling at the president’s palace, and let it at once be understood by the people that this is a most splendid gambling administration?
Mr. Chairman, such conduct in the chief magistrate of this nation, is enough ... 
If you wanted to uncover the secrets of the Universe for yourself, all you’d have to do is interrogate the Universe in a way that compelled nature itself to provide the answers to your deepest questions in a fashion that was comprehensible to you. When any two quanta of energy interact — irrespective of their properties, including whether they’re particles or antiparticles, massive or massless, fermions or bosons, etc. — the result of that interaction has the potential to inform you about the underlying laws and rules that the system has to obey. If you can know:
all the possible outcomes of any interaction,
including what their relative probabilities were,
and can validate your theoretical model by matching it up with the experimental/observational data you collect,
then and only then can you claim to have some understanding of what was going on. Being quantitative in precisely this fashion, asking not only “what happens” but also “by how much” and “how often,” is what makes physics the robust science that it is.
Quite surprisingly, everything that we know about the Universe can, in some way, be traced back to the ... 
If you haven’t read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, you’ve certainly heard of them — if not in school, then on Instagram, TikTok, or a podcast. Composed by the second-century Roman emperor in his tent on nights between long marches and bloody battles, they’re one of the foundational texts of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that first emerged around 300 B.C., and which has recently found an unlikely second life on social media.
Stoicism’s modern-day resurgence has been traced back to viral marketing executive turned self-help author Ryan Holiday’s 2014 book The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, which introduced snippets of Meditations to professional athletes and Silicon Valley elite. Other books from Holiday — including The Daily Stoic, which spawned a popular newsletter of the same name — followed suit, as did numerous copycats. Finding audiences outside college campuses, new editions of Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and Epictetus’ Discourses also became bestsellers.
Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, isn’t surprised at Stoicism’s newfound popularity. A lot of Stoic ideas and ... 
All across the Universe, we can learn what stars are made of simply by taking a spectrum of the light coming from them. While some stars are low in what astronomers call metallicity — the fraction of elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium — and others have high metallicities, the ratios of the heavy elements inside of them are normally fairly consistent. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the Universe; carbon is fourth, followed by neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron, and sulfur rounding out the top 10. By measuring the strength of the absorption lines coming from these elements, we can determine their abundances: relative to hydrogen and relative to each other.
This is true for stars like our Sun, and it’s also true for the remnants of stars like our Sun: white dwarf stars. Every once in a while, however, a star or stellar remnant will encounter an object — a planet, moon, asteroid, or comet — and devour it. When it does, the elements from that object get smeared out across the surface of that ...