What does it truly mean to be alive? Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse answers biology’s most fundamental (and elusive) question in his full interview with Big Think.
Drawing from decades of research, Nurse explores how five core ideas redefine life, from the hidden power of the cell to the bizarre machinery inside us all.
This video Life is older, weirder, and more interconnected than we ever thought is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In our physical Universe, there’s always an order in which things happen. The Sun, Earth, and the rest of our Solar System all formed at one particular moment in time: around 4.5 billion years ago, right here in our own Milky Way. When we look at our Sun in detail, however, we find that it contains a large percentage of heavy elements: about 1-2% of the Sun is composed of elements that could only have been forged in previous generations of stars. Our Universe, however, is an impressive 13.8 billion years old: fully three times as old as the Sun. If we could rewind the clock back closer to the initiation of the hot Big Bang, we would find that stars existed for most of that time, but they were more pristine, less evolved, and contained fewer heavier elements.
At some point, in this imaginary time-running-backward scenario, we would encounter something remarkable: the very first stars of all to form in cosmic history. If we were to go back earlier than that, we would find no stars at all, just neutral ... Continue Reading »
“Not a book I would choose to read under normal circumstances,” one reviewer said of Everything is Tuberculosis, the latest non-fiction book by author, educator, and internet personality John Green.
Likewise, Green — best known for the young adult novels Looking for Alaska (2005) and The Fault in Our Stars (2012), as well as for co-founding the educational YouTube channel Crash Course with his brother, Hank — would not have written this book if it weren’t for the extraordinary situation in which we find ourselves.
Today, most Westerners associate tuberculosis (TB) with the distant past or the novels of Charles Dickens. But TB is neither the stuff of history nor fiction. In 2023, Green writes, over one million people died of the illness worldwide — more than “malaria, typhoid, and war combined.” Briefly rivaled by COVID-19, it remains the deadliest infectious disease on Earth even though it’s perfectly curable and has been since the 1950s.
Everything is Tuberculosis not only offers a concise history of TB but also a scathing condemnation of wealthy nations’ unwillingness to help fight the disease outside their ... Continue Reading »
Stephen Heintz’s recent “A Logic for the Future” is a bold, sweeping essay that confronts our current era of existential turbulence — and dares to imagine a more just and resilient global order.
To me, what sets this piece apart is not just its ambition, but its tangible resolutions. Rather than simply critiquing the current system, Heintz proposes a comprehensive overhaul of global governance — from remaking the United Nations to codifying the rights of nature and future generations. To Heintz, the future we want to build is one rooted in pluralism, justice, and shared planetary stewardship.
At its core, it’s a piece that dares to use today’s chaos to ask: What if we redesigned the world order from scratch?
Key quote: “Readers of this paper may find some of the ideas presented to be idealistic or even utopian. But this essay is intended to address the question of what might be, not merely what can be. As proven throughout history, human consciousness endows us all with the ability to make changes that contribute to longer and better lives. The challenge of designing ... Continue Reading »
Could the tiniest ripple in time alter the future of our universe? Can the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings really cause a hurricane? Professor and political scientist Brian Klaas dives into the deep waters of chaos theory.
From the myth of total control to the limits of predictability, Brian Klaas traces how the butterfly effect challenges the illusion of individual agency.
This video The impossibility of control in a butterfly-effected world is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Back in 2021, before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched, an incredible suite of decisions were made: about which observing projects and programs would be granted observing time, and how much time they would be granted. Some of the decisions granted are known as GTO, or Guaranteed Time Observations, which went to members of the teams that put painstaking efforts into developing the software and hardware JWST would require in order to function and conduct science operations properly. But the rest of the decisions were part of the GO, or General Observers, program, which provided the worldwide astronomical community the opportunity to apply for JWST observing time.
Of all the GO programs that were selected before JWST ever launched, the COSMOS-Web program, led by Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe and Dr. Caitlin Casey, was the largest and most comprehensive. All told, the COSMOS-Web team:
was composed of 50 researchers,
was granted 208.6 hours (almost 9 days) of JWST observing time,
was designed to map 0.54 square degrees of sky in the near-infrared (with NIRCam),
as well as a third of that area (0.18 square degrees) ... Continue Reading »
“Put yourself […] in the mind of a 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old,” Oliver Burkeman instructs me. “You just get up every day, and you have no say. I mean, of course, you get some say, but you know what I mean? Where you live, where you’re going — you know that the plans are just completely outside of your control. Which, in a sense, is a very deep truth about the human condition, right?”
For this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the best-selling author and philosopher Oliver Burkeman about his various books, all of which, in their way, explore human mortality and limits. In 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Burkeman makes the disarmingly stark point that we have only so many days on this planet. We cannot do everything. We have to choose where and how to spend our time.
In our conversation, we paused to zoom in on a problem this finitude presents: How can we marry the ideas of mortality and limit with the human need to control things? We imagine ourselves immortal, but the world has ... Continue Reading »
How does trauma shape our view of the world — and why does it matter? According to renowned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., trauma isn’t just a painful memory; it actually changes brain function, often leaving us stuck in a sense of danger.
His 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score sparked a global conversation about the lasting effects of trauma and the path to healing. Translated into 43 languages and a New York Times bestseller for 344 weeks and counting, its reach reflects a growing movement: millions seeking not just to understand trauma, but to recover from it.
We sat down with van der Kolk to learn how to begin.
The anatomy of trauma
After a traumatic experience, the brain shifts into survival mode. The frontal lobe — the part responsible for logic and tracking time — goes offline, while the amygdala, which detects threats, goes into overdrive.
Unable to register that the danger has passed, the brain keeps reliving intense emotional distress. “When that part of ... Continue Reading »
When it comes to investigating the Universe, the ultimate goal is to uncover the closest approximation of the scientific truth about reality as possible. This takes the combination of two approaches, simultaneously.
Over on the theory side, we have our best models, laws, and framework to represent reality and the rules that it obeys. We use what has already been established to make predictions about what we expect to see, experimentally and/or observationally, when we put the Universe itself to the test.
Meanwhile, on the experiment side, we look at what theory predicts and attempt to test it to greater precision than ever before.
If it confirms what theory predicts, that’s an improvement in our understanding of the Universe: not a revolutionary change, but incrementally increasing what is known. If it disagrees with theoretical predictions, it’s an opportunity for advancement: either there’s a flaw with the theory or the experiment, or if not, there’s a chance that there’s more to reality than we presently understand. Or, if there are multiple different theoretical predictions, experiment gives us a chance to tell them apart.
In the ... Continue Reading »
In a galaxy teeming with potentially habitable planets, it’s reasonable to speculate that other spacefaring civilizations exist — and perhaps even that some, or their robotic probes, have already reached Earth. The distances between stars are daunting, yes, but if travel time doesn’t matter — either because the aliens are non-biological robots or because they go dormant for the trip (some cicadas, for example, sleep 17 years underground only to emerge for a few months) — the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors can’t be ruled out.
That raises an obvious question: As the physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?” Despite thousands of UFO/UAP sightings in the past 80 years alone, there is still no generally accepted evidence of an alien spacecraft reaching Earth.
It’s not as though we haven’t looked. Any number of telescopes and spaceborne cameras might have spotted an incoming spacecraft that came close to us. Ground-based telescope networks can detect objects as small as 10 centimeters as far out as geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles altitude). In recent decades, NASA-funded early-warning systems like the Catalina Sky Survey and the ... Continue Reading »
In our physical Universe, there’s always an order in which things happen. The Sun, Earth, and the rest of our Solar System all formed at one particular moment in time: around 4.5 billion years ago, right here in our own Milky Way. When we look at our Sun in detail, however, we find that it contains a large percentage of heavy elements: about 1-2% of the Sun is composed of elements that could only have been forged in previous generations of stars. Our Universe, however, is an impressive 13.8 billion years old: fully three times as old as the Sun. If we could rewind the clock back closer to the initiation of the hot Big Bang, we would find that stars existed for most of that time, but they were more pristine, less evolved, and contained fewer heavier elements.
At some point, in this imaginary time-running-backward scenario, we would encounter something remarkable: the very first stars of all to form in cosmic history. If we were to go back earlier than that, we would find no stars at all, just neutral ... 
“Not a book I would choose to read under normal circumstances,” one reviewer said of Everything is Tuberculosis, the latest non-fiction book by author, educator, and internet personality John Green.
Likewise, Green — best known for the young adult novels Looking for Alaska (2005) and The Fault in Our Stars (2012), as well as for co-founding the educational YouTube channel Crash Course with his brother, Hank — would not have written this book if it weren’t for the extraordinary situation in which we find ourselves.
Today, most Westerners associate tuberculosis (TB) with the distant past or the novels of Charles Dickens. But TB is neither the stuff of history nor fiction. In 2023, Green writes, over one million people died of the illness worldwide — more than “malaria, typhoid, and war combined.” Briefly rivaled by COVID-19, it remains the deadliest infectious disease on Earth even though it’s perfectly curable and has been since the 1950s.
Everything is Tuberculosis not only offers a concise history of TB but also a scathing condemnation of wealthy nations’ unwillingness to help fight the disease outside their ... 
Stephen Heintz’s recent “A Logic for the Future” is a bold, sweeping essay that confronts our current era of existential turbulence — and dares to imagine a more just and resilient global order.
To me, what sets this piece apart is not just its ambition, but its tangible resolutions. Rather than simply critiquing the current system, Heintz proposes a comprehensive overhaul of global governance — from remaking the United Nations to codifying the rights of nature and future generations. To Heintz, the future we want to build is one rooted in pluralism, justice, and shared planetary stewardship.
At its core, it’s a piece that dares to use today’s chaos to ask: What if we redesigned the world order from scratch?
Key quote: “Readers of this paper may find some of the ideas presented to be idealistic or even utopian. But this essay is intended to address the question of what might be, not merely what can be. As proven throughout history, human consciousness endows us all with the ability to make changes that contribute to longer and better lives. The challenge of designing ... 
Back in 2021, before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched, an incredible suite of decisions were made: about which observing projects and programs would be granted observing time, and how much time they would be granted. Some of the decisions granted are known as GTO, or Guaranteed Time Observations, which went to members of the teams that put painstaking efforts into developing the software and hardware JWST would require in order to function and conduct science operations properly. But the rest of the decisions were part of the GO, or General Observers, program, which provided the worldwide astronomical community the opportunity to apply for JWST observing time.
Of all the GO programs that were selected before JWST ever launched, the COSMOS-Web program, led by Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe and Dr. Caitlin Casey, was the largest and most comprehensive. All told, the COSMOS-Web team:
was composed of 50 researchers,
was granted 208.6 hours (almost 9 days) of JWST observing time,
was designed to map 0.54 square degrees of sky in the near-infrared (with NIRCam),
as well as a third of that area (0.18 square degrees) ... 
“Put yourself […] in the mind of a 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old,” Oliver Burkeman instructs me. “You just get up every day, and you have no say. I mean, of course, you get some say, but you know what I mean? Where you live, where you’re going — you know that the plans are just completely outside of your control. Which, in a sense, is a very deep truth about the human condition, right?”
For this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with the best-selling author and philosopher Oliver Burkeman about his various books, all of which, in their way, explore human mortality and limits. In 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Burkeman makes the disarmingly stark point that we have only so many days on this planet. We cannot do everything. We have to choose where and how to spend our time.
In our conversation, we paused to zoom in on a problem this finitude presents: How can we marry the ideas of mortality and limit with the human need to control things? We imagine ourselves immortal, but the world has ... 
When it comes to investigating the Universe, the ultimate goal is to uncover the closest approximation of the scientific truth about reality as possible. This takes the combination of two approaches, simultaneously.
Over on the theory side, we have our best models, laws, and framework to represent reality and the rules that it obeys. We use what has already been established to make predictions about what we expect to see, experimentally and/or observationally, when we put the Universe itself to the test.
Meanwhile, on the experiment side, we look at what theory predicts and attempt to test it to greater precision than ever before.
If it confirms what theory predicts, that’s an improvement in our understanding of the Universe: not a revolutionary change, but incrementally increasing what is known. If it disagrees with theoretical predictions, it’s an opportunity for advancement: either there’s a flaw with the theory or the experiment, or if not, there’s a chance that there’s more to reality than we presently understand. Or, if there are multiple different theoretical predictions, experiment gives us a chance to tell them apart.
In the ... 
In a galaxy teeming with potentially habitable planets, it’s reasonable to speculate that other spacefaring civilizations exist — and perhaps even that some, or their robotic probes, have already reached Earth. The distances between stars are daunting, yes, but if travel time doesn’t matter — either because the aliens are non-biological robots or because they go dormant for the trip (some cicadas, for example, sleep 17 years underground only to emerge for a few months) — the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors can’t be ruled out.
That raises an obvious question: As the physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?” Despite thousands of UFO/UAP sightings in the past 80 years alone, there is still no generally accepted evidence of an alien spacecraft reaching Earth.
It’s not as though we haven’t looked. Any number of telescopes and spaceborne cameras might have spotted an incoming spacecraft that came close to us. Ground-based telescope networks can detect objects as small as 10 centimeters as far out as geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles altitude). In recent decades, NASA-funded early-warning systems like the Catalina Sky Survey and the ...