What makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that makes us who we are, and which transcends social and cultural experiences. This is our brain. Our brains create us. No matter where you are from, where you live or have lived, the language you speak, the color of your skin, it is our brains that give us our identities.
In the past, some disagreed, arguing instead as Descartes did that our personal identity — our “self” — is separate from the brain. Most modern views, however, consider the brain to be the basis for all the experiences we have of our selves. Using new scanning techniques, some neuroscientists have even attempted to define the brain region where “the self” might reside. However, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett drily put it: “It is a category mistake to start looking around for ... Continue Reading »
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time.
I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved hitchhiking because it offered a fantastic way to get to know an amazing cross section of people from many different classes and races and walks of life. Hitching is particularly good at connecting you to those living ... Continue Reading »
Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appearing in one.
This video Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium. Beyond that, there are round planetary bodies — numerous moons, dwarf planets, and even rocky worlds themselves — that have enough mass to get that job done. At still higher masses, we find gas giant planets, brown dwarfs, and stars of all different colors, temperatures, and luminosities that will persist in shining for a wide variety of durations.
Once a star dies, there are a number of possible fates that can ensue as well, as a stellar corpse can remain as a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. And yet, throughout the entirety of this cosmic story, there’s just one parameter that overwhelmingly determines what type of object we’ll wind up with, as well as what properties it will possess: mass. In a straightforward fashion, ... Continue Reading »
Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.
The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals.
Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. We’re instead using it to describe works that place heavy emphasis on influencing readers through symbolism and emotional appeals. Whether they are narrative masterpieces or utter dreck, whether they conform to reality or distort it beyond recognition, and whether we agree or disagree isn’t the point. For these ... Continue Reading »
For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up.
This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and anchors. A comparison to Planck, which uses the early relic method instead of the distance ladder method, is also shown. Very clearly, the distance ladder and early relic methods do not yield mutually compatible results.
Credit: A.G. Riess et al., Astrophysical Journal submitted, arXiv:2408.11770, 2024
Different measurement methods should converge on the same answer.
A large class of early relic methods, involving either the CMB and/or BAO (with a specific focus on DESI publications), all favor a Universe expanding at ~67 km/s/Mpc. Although there are a few groups that have outlier values for distance ladder measurements (including the CCHP group, shown as the second-from-bottom point), the strongest measurements, from the SH0ES and Pantheon+ collaborations, for instance, favor a value of ~73 km/s/Mpc, as shown here with smaller error bars. The two sets of values disagree at ... Continue Reading »
Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A large, massive enough clump will heat up and have a random shape: collapsing along the shortest axis first, forming a protostar at the center surrounded by a disk of material. That’s where the story of planet formation begins.
Assuming the conditions in the disk are sufficient, clumps will begin to form, and over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the first protoplanets and then full-fledged planets will arise: a relatively rapid cosmic process, that’s usually all complete within a mere 10 million years: a blink of a cosmic eye in the history of our own 4.5 billion year old Solar System. However, by looking at the youngest stellar and planetary systems, we can uncover many details that are common to planetary systems in general, and in turn, we can learn how our own Solar System ... Continue Reading »
Due to its Nazi past, Germany’s post–World War II militant democracy has been unusually aggressive in banning hatred and extremism. Early postwar laws prohibited Nazi symbols, propaganda, and organizations. A turning point came in 1960 with the “swastika epidemic” — a surge of anti-Semitic graffiti and attacks on synagogues. In response, the German parliament made it illegal to incite hatred or insult “segments of the population” in ways that might disturb public peace. The epidemic was later revealed to be a KGB “active measures” campaign. Despite this, Germany has continually expanded its hate-speech laws to cover areas such as incitement, Holocaust denial, and the distribution of propaganda and symbols of unconstitutional organizations. Even criminal defamation laws can function as hate-speech provisions under this broad framework.
While Germany’s speech laws were intended to protect minorities and democracy, they now frequently shield governments from criticism. Alarmingly, they are sometimes used against those minorities they were designed to protect — such as the frequent prosecutions of Muslims and Palestinians during pro-Palestinian protests. This effectively leaves a predominantly white, German political administrative class to determine ... Continue Reading »
On April 6, 2026, humanity set an all-time record as part of the Artemis II mission: the distance record for how far a living human has ever traveled away from planet Earth. Traveling farther than any other humans in history, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen reached a maximum distance of 406,773 km (252,757 miles), breaking the previous record set way back on April 15, 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission. For 56 years, the Apollo 13 record stood, as those astronauts reached a maximum distance of 400,171 km (248,655 miles): a record that has now been extended by an impressive 6602 km (4021 miles), greater than the radius of the Earth.
But why did this happen? What enabled the Artemis II mission to surpass the Apollo-era distance record? That’s what Daniel Fleisher wants to know, writing in with the following inquiry:
“NASA is telling the world that the Artemis mission has now traveled farther from Earth than any previous crewed space mission. I don’t doubt them, but what explains it? Or maybe, what allows for it? Google ... 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 makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that makes us who we are, and which transcends social and cultural experiences. This is our brain. Our brains create us. No matter where you are from, where you live or have lived, the language you speak, the color of your skin, it is our brains that give us our identities.
In the past, some disagreed, arguing instead as Descartes did that our personal identity — our “self” — is separate from the brain. Most modern views, however, consider the brain to be the basis for all the experiences we have of our selves. Using new scanning techniques, some neuroscientists have even attempted to define the brain region where “the self” might reside. However, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett drily put it: “It is a category mistake to start looking around for ... 
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time.
I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved hitchhiking because it offered a fantastic way to get to know an amazing cross section of people from many different classes and races and walks of life. Hitching is particularly good at connecting you to those living ... 
Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium. Beyond that, there are round planetary bodies — numerous moons, dwarf planets, and even rocky worlds themselves — that have enough mass to get that job done. At still higher masses, we find gas giant planets, brown dwarfs, and stars of all different colors, temperatures, and luminosities that will persist in shining for a wide variety of durations.
Once a star dies, there are a number of possible fates that can ensue as well, as a stellar corpse can remain as a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. And yet, throughout the entirety of this cosmic story, there’s just one parameter that overwhelmingly determines what type of object we’ll wind up with, as well as what properties it will possess: mass. In a straightforward fashion, ... 
Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.
The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals.
Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. We’re instead using it to describe works that place heavy emphasis on influencing readers through symbolism and emotional appeals. Whether they are narrative masterpieces or utter dreck, whether they conform to reality or distort it beyond recognition, and whether we agree or disagree isn’t the point. For these ... 
For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up.
This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and anchors. A comparison to Planck, which uses the early relic method instead of the distance ladder method, is also shown. Very clearly, the distance ladder and early relic methods do not yield mutually compatible results.
Credit: A.G. Riess et al., Astrophysical Journal submitted, arXiv:2408.11770, 2024
Different measurement methods should converge on the same answer.
A large class of early relic methods, involving either the CMB and/or BAO (with a specific focus on DESI publications), all favor a Universe expanding at ~67 km/s/Mpc. Although there are a few groups that have outlier values for distance ladder measurements (including the CCHP group, shown as the second-from-bottom point), the strongest measurements, from the SH0ES and Pantheon+ collaborations, for instance, favor a value of ~73 km/s/Mpc, as shown here with smaller error bars. The two sets of values disagree at ... 
Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A large, massive enough clump will heat up and have a random shape: collapsing along the shortest axis first, forming a protostar at the center surrounded by a disk of material. That’s where the story of planet formation begins.
Assuming the conditions in the disk are sufficient, clumps will begin to form, and over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the first protoplanets and then full-fledged planets will arise: a relatively rapid cosmic process, that’s usually all complete within a mere 10 million years: a blink of a cosmic eye in the history of our own 4.5 billion year old Solar System. However, by looking at the youngest stellar and planetary systems, we can uncover many details that are common to planetary systems in general, and in turn, we can learn how our own Solar System ... 
Due to its Nazi past, Germany’s post–World War II militant democracy has been unusually aggressive in banning hatred and extremism. Early postwar laws prohibited Nazi symbols, propaganda, and organizations. A turning point came in 1960 with the “swastika epidemic” — a surge of anti-Semitic graffiti and attacks on synagogues. In response, the German parliament made it illegal to incite hatred or insult “segments of the population” in ways that might disturb public peace. The epidemic was later revealed to be a KGB “active measures” campaign. Despite this, Germany has continually expanded its hate-speech laws to cover areas such as incitement, Holocaust denial, and the distribution of propaganda and symbols of unconstitutional organizations. Even criminal defamation laws can function as hate-speech provisions under this broad framework.
While Germany’s speech laws were intended to protect minorities and democracy, they now frequently shield governments from criticism. Alarmingly, they are sometimes used against those minorities they were designed to protect — such as the frequent prosecutions of Muslims and Palestinians during pro-Palestinian protests. This effectively leaves a predominantly white, German political administrative class to determine ... 
On April 6, 2026, humanity set an all-time record as part of the Artemis II mission: the distance record for how far a living human has ever traveled away from planet Earth. Traveling farther than any other humans in history, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen reached a maximum distance of 406,773 km (252,757 miles), breaking the previous record set way back on April 15, 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission. For 56 years, the Apollo 13 record stood, as those astronauts reached a maximum distance of 400,171 km (248,655 miles): a record that has now been extended by an impressive 6602 km (4021 miles), greater than the radius of the Earth.
But why did this happen? What enabled the Artemis II mission to surpass the Apollo-era distance record? That’s what Daniel Fleisher wants to know, writing in with the following inquiry:
“NASA is telling the world that the Artemis mission has now traveled farther from Earth than any previous crewed space mission. I don’t doubt them, but what explains it? Or maybe, what allows for it? Google ...