In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million miles from Earth. This was caused by the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex, which collected the resulting dust and returned those samples to Earth, marking the first time a U.S. mission had retrieved material from an asteroid.
Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That’s not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse — a mirror image — of the way those building blocks appear on Earth.
This was interesting timing. Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts — in a paper published in Nature — had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of “mirror life.”
While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids ... Continue Reading »
Whether you work at a modest startup or a multimillion dollar company, chances are you have heard of the Business Model Canvas (BMC). Similar to architectural blueprints or circuit diagrams, these standardized templates provide simplified overviews of complex organizations, and can be used to turn an ailing company around, or design a healthy one from the ground up.
First developed by business theorist Alex Osterwalder and computer scientist Yves Pigneur in the early 2000s as part of Osterwalder’s PhD thesis, the BMC framework has since developed into one of the most well-known and widely used business modeling tools on the planet, embedding itself in MBA curricula and guiding decision-making processes in C-suites and incubators alike.
In addition to authoring several bestselling books on business modeling — including 2020’s The Invincible Company — Osterwalder now serves as the founder and CEO of Strategyzer, an innovation consultancy and software development firm that helps companies design, test, and scale new business models.
Osterwalder joined Big Think over Zoom from his native Switzerland to talk about the merits of “optimizing happiness,” what many people continue to get ... Continue Reading »
Feeling more impatient lately? It’s not entirely your fault.
Sarah Schnitker, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, explains how a culture of instant gratification — fueled by our use of smart phones and on-demand everything — has made patience feel unnecessary. But her research shows that patience helps people stay regulated, persist through challenges, and feel more satisfied with their progress.
This video How to wait well, according to neuroscience and psychology is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
While sampling ancient, dry riverbed rocks on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover found something astonishing.
The rock shown here, discovered by NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars, contains leopard-like spots on a reddish rock located in Mars’s Jezero Crater in July of 2024. Sample analysis indicated organic molecules and reduction/oxidation reactions, which could serve as a potential biosignature. However, abiotic pathways to the production of these characteristics cannot be ruled out as of yet.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
An unusual rock contained organic, carbon-bearing minerals.
This figure shows an aerial view of the path of exploration undertaken by NASA’s Perseverance Rover, including the important Bright Angel and Masonic Temple regions, which includes some unusual rock formations that warranted further investigation. Below, the view of that same region is shown in a NASA Perseverance panoramic view.
Credit: J.A. Hurowitz et al., Nature, 2025
Reaction fronts were enriched with iron, phosphorous, and sulfurous compounds.
This four-panel graph shows the reduction/oxidation processes that occurred in the Bright Angel and Masonic Temple regions within Jezero Crater, as explored by NASA’s Perseverance Rover. The discovery of organic molecules and these sets of reactions hint at, ... Continue Reading »
If you want to see the Universe, you have to do more than merely open your eyes. Even with the advantage of large, powerful telescopes, even from far above the limitations of Earth’s atmosphere in space, there are still enormous portions of the Universe that are virtually invisible to our optical telescopes. The reason why? Because enormous portions of the Universe are blocked by cosmic dust: small, cold grains of atom-based matter that absorb and block the visible wavelengths of light that human eyes have adapted to see. They obscure enormous regions of the galactic plane, and hinder our ability to observe star-forming regions, planet-forming disks, and objects that lie behind and beyond the plane of the Milky Way.
Sure, we’ve developed many techniques, like multi-wavelength astronomy (particularly at longer wavelengths), to help peer through that cosmic dust, and to identify the objects that lie both inside and behind it, but the existence of cosmic dust itself has been a longstanding puzzle for astronomers. This week’s Ask Ethan question comes from High School teacher Allan Clark, who was puzzled by its ... Continue Reading »
In the 2009 documentary Transcendent Man, the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil shares his thoughts on death. Although many philosophers and theologians accept mortality as an inevitable and indeed defining feature of human existence, Kurzweil refuses to accept this line of thinking. “Death is a great tragedy, a profound loss,” he declares in the film, haunted by the memory of losing his father at age 22. “I don’t accept it.”
Kurzweil would have found an ally in the little-known 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose posthumously published text Philosophy of the Common Task made the at-the-time daring argument that death was little more than a design flaw — one which advancements in science and technology could help to rectify. Fedorov also believed that this goal of rectification — of achieving immortality — would unite social groups whose mutual fear of death had historically pitted them in opposition to each other.
“Our task,” Fedorov wrote, “is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.”
Fedorov’s writing never turned mainstream, ... Continue Reading »
Success, status, and achievements promise to deliver happiness, but often come up empty when realized. Tal Ben-Shahar’s own experience with this personal dissatisfaction drove him to study the science and philosophy of wellbeing.
Ben-Shahar outlines how anti-fragility and post-traumatic growth reframe hardship as opportunity and how happiness can be found through connection, purpose, and clarity instead.
This video Become stronger: Jumpstart your anti-fragile systems is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,” says Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale. I’ve been revisiting this quote lately because, in many ways, I feel Western democracies have gone fully through the looking glass when it comes to how we discuss politics.
The words we use to describe our positions and those of others often sit on shaky perches. They shift — not just in implication but sometimes even definitionally — based on the context, speaker, and audience, leaving us without a clear sense of what people mean. And perhaps no other word in politics today sits on a shakier perch than liberalism.
Consider that in the United States, a liberal is someone who stands on the political left, probably voted for Joe Biden, and may subscribe to some lite socialism (another Humpty Dumpty term, but one at a time). Despite that, some self-described leftists and progressives in the U.S. view liberals as political opponents. Across the pond in Europe, a liberal may support policies ... Continue Reading »
9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with looming deadlines. Emails multiplying like rabbits. And somewhere in the mental background, the nagging sense that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.
My attention ping-ponged. The article deadline that felt manageable yesterday now loomed. The client presentation that should take an hour felt like it would consume my entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading into a swamp.
Everything screamed “urgent,” but nothing felt achievable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from how I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think successful people innately had better focus. Turns out, they just knew something about their brains that too often escapes the rest of us: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intentionality with which you direct your muscles at the gym.
We’re facing ... Continue Reading »
The benefits of AI are immense. Unparalleled efficiency. Speed. Convenience. But every advantage carries a price tag. And I believe AI is a perfect example.
AI can radically simplify our lives (and I use it often), yet at the same time, it threatens to erode the very foundation of trust — trust in information, trust in institutions, and even trust in one another.
In the knowledge work age, your value was often measured by your IQ. But as Kevin Kelly argues, in the age of AI, the more critical metric is shifting. What matters most is no longer just intelligence, but what he calls the Trust Quotient — the ability to be authentic and develop trust in a world where machines can imitate almost everything else.
“Trust is a broad word that will be unbundled as it seeps into the AI ecosystem,” Kelly writes. “Part security, part reliability, part responsibility, and part accountability, these strands will become more precise as we synthesize it and measure it. Trust will be something we’ll be talking a lot more about in the coming decade.”
Key quote: “Right ... Continue Reading »
In 2020, a small blast ejected debris from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, as it hurtled through space 200 million miles from Earth. This was caused by the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex, which collected the resulting dust and returned those samples to Earth, marking the first time a U.S. mission had retrieved material from an asteroid.
Earlier this year, researchers found those samples contained the building blocks for life, including amino acids and nucleobases (which form DNA, among other molecules). That’s not unusual for an asteroid, but what was unexpected was the form those molecules took: roughly half of them being a perfect inverse — a mirror image — of the way those building blocks appear on Earth.
This was interesting timing. Only a few months prior, toward the end of 2024, a team of Nobel-winning biologists and experts — in a paper published in Nature — had raised the alarm on a potential new threat to all living things on Earth. They warned of the potential creation of “mirror life.”
While the naturally occurring mirror molecules hitching a ride on nearby asteroids ... 
Whether you work at a modest startup or a multimillion dollar company, chances are you have heard of the Business Model Canvas (BMC). Similar to architectural blueprints or circuit diagrams, these standardized templates provide simplified overviews of complex organizations, and can be used to turn an ailing company around, or design a healthy one from the ground up.
First developed by business theorist Alex Osterwalder and computer scientist Yves Pigneur in the early 2000s as part of Osterwalder’s PhD thesis, the BMC framework has since developed into one of the most well-known and widely used business modeling tools on the planet, embedding itself in MBA curricula and guiding decision-making processes in C-suites and incubators alike.
In addition to authoring several bestselling books on business modeling — including 2020’s The Invincible Company — Osterwalder now serves as the founder and CEO of Strategyzer, an innovation consultancy and software development firm that helps companies design, test, and scale new business models.
Osterwalder joined Big Think over Zoom from his native Switzerland to talk about the merits of “optimizing happiness,” what many people continue to get ... 
While sampling ancient, dry riverbed rocks on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover found something astonishing.
The rock shown here, discovered by NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars, contains leopard-like spots on a reddish rock located in Mars’s Jezero Crater in July of 2024. Sample analysis indicated organic molecules and reduction/oxidation reactions, which could serve as a potential biosignature. However, abiotic pathways to the production of these characteristics cannot be ruled out as of yet.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
An unusual rock contained organic, carbon-bearing minerals.
This figure shows an aerial view of the path of exploration undertaken by NASA’s Perseverance Rover, including the important Bright Angel and Masonic Temple regions, which includes some unusual rock formations that warranted further investigation. Below, the view of that same region is shown in a NASA Perseverance panoramic view.
Credit: J.A. Hurowitz et al., Nature, 2025
Reaction fronts were enriched with iron, phosphorous, and sulfurous compounds.
This four-panel graph shows the reduction/oxidation processes that occurred in the Bright Angel and Masonic Temple regions within Jezero Crater, as explored by NASA’s Perseverance Rover. The discovery of organic molecules and these sets of reactions hint at, ... 
If you want to see the Universe, you have to do more than merely open your eyes. Even with the advantage of large, powerful telescopes, even from far above the limitations of Earth’s atmosphere in space, there are still enormous portions of the Universe that are virtually invisible to our optical telescopes. The reason why? Because enormous portions of the Universe are blocked by cosmic dust: small, cold grains of atom-based matter that absorb and block the visible wavelengths of light that human eyes have adapted to see. They obscure enormous regions of the galactic plane, and hinder our ability to observe star-forming regions, planet-forming disks, and objects that lie behind and beyond the plane of the Milky Way.
Sure, we’ve developed many techniques, like multi-wavelength astronomy (particularly at longer wavelengths), to help peer through that cosmic dust, and to identify the objects that lie both inside and behind it, but the existence of cosmic dust itself has been a longstanding puzzle for astronomers. This week’s Ask Ethan question comes from High School teacher Allan Clark, who was puzzled by its ... 
In the 2009 documentary Transcendent Man, the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil shares his thoughts on death. Although many philosophers and theologians accept mortality as an inevitable and indeed defining feature of human existence, Kurzweil refuses to accept this line of thinking. “Death is a great tragedy, a profound loss,” he declares in the film, haunted by the memory of losing his father at age 22. “I don’t accept it.”
Kurzweil would have found an ally in the little-known 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose posthumously published text Philosophy of the Common Task made the at-the-time daring argument that death was little more than a design flaw — one which advancements in science and technology could help to rectify. Fedorov also believed that this goal of rectification — of achieving immortality — would unite social groups whose mutual fear of death had historically pitted them in opposition to each other.
“Our task,” Fedorov wrote, “is to make nature, the blind force of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.”
Fedorov’s writing never turned mainstream, ... 
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,” says Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale. I’ve been revisiting this quote lately because, in many ways, I feel Western democracies have gone fully through the looking glass when it comes to how we discuss politics.
The words we use to describe our positions and those of others often sit on shaky perches. They shift — not just in implication but sometimes even definitionally — based on the context, speaker, and audience, leaving us without a clear sense of what people mean. And perhaps no other word in politics today sits on a shakier perch than liberalism.
Consider that in the United States, a liberal is someone who stands on the political left, probably voted for Joe Biden, and may subscribe to some lite socialism (another Humpty Dumpty term, but one at a time). Despite that, some self-described leftists and progressives in the U.S. view liberals as political opponents. Across the pond in Europe, a liberal may support policies ... 
9 a.m. on Saturday. I’m sitting at the café, laptop open, surrounded by the chatter of customers, and the scattered debris of modern knowledge work. Three half-finished articles. Two consulting projects with looming deadlines. Emails multiplying like rabbits. And somewhere in the mental background, the nagging sense that I should be exercising, calling my parents, and planning next week’s content calendar for Substack.
My attention ping-ponged. The article deadline that felt manageable yesterday now loomed. The client presentation that should take an hour felt like it would consume my entire weekend. Even checking email felt like wading into a swamp.
Everything screamed “urgent,” but nothing felt achievable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but the scattered feeling stemmed more from how I was directing my attention than a lack of willpower or time management. I used to think successful people innately had better focus. Turns out, they just knew something about their brains that too often escapes the rest of us: It’s possible to direct your attention with the same intentionality with which you direct your muscles at the gym.
We’re facing ... 
The benefits of AI are immense. Unparalleled efficiency. Speed. Convenience. But every advantage carries a price tag. And I believe AI is a perfect example.
AI can radically simplify our lives (and I use it often), yet at the same time, it threatens to erode the very foundation of trust — trust in information, trust in institutions, and even trust in one another.
In the knowledge work age, your value was often measured by your IQ. But as Kevin Kelly argues, in the age of AI, the more critical metric is shifting. What matters most is no longer just intelligence, but what he calls the Trust Quotient — the ability to be authentic and develop trust in a world where machines can imitate almost everything else.
“Trust is a broad word that will be unbundled as it seeps into the AI ecosystem,” Kelly writes. “Part security, part reliability, part responsibility, and part accountability, these strands will become more precise as we synthesize it and measure it. Trust will be something we’ll be talking a lot more about in the coming decade.”
Key quote: “Right ...