We speak about cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease as if they arrived independently. But we ignore the process that makes them more likely with every passing year: aging.
Longevity scientist Andrew Steele walks us through the emerging science that’s trying to reverse the aging process completely.
This video Why even the healthiest people hit a wall at age 70 is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Starting on the night of January 19, 2026, planet Earth was treated to a global show that had only been seen once before in the 21st century: a spectacular auroral display that wasn’t triggered by a solar flare or by a coronal mass ejection, but instead by a completely different form of space weather known as a solar radiation storm. Whereas solar flares normally involve the ejection of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere and coronal mass ejections typically involve accelerated plasma particles from the Sun’s corona, a solar radiation storm is simply an intensification of the charged ions normally emitted by the Sun as part of the solar wind. Only, in a radiation storm, both the density and speed of the emitted particles get greatly enhanced.
We’re currently still in the peak years of our current sunspot cycle: the 11-year solar cycle that’s been tracked for centuries, where “peak years” see 100+ sunspots on the Sun while “valley years” see a largely featureless Sun. While several notable auroral displays have graced Earth in recent years, there’s only been one other severe ... Continue Reading »
In 2014, a team of neuroscientists, including Dr. Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave macaque monkeys a carefully standardized task: categorize visual dot patterns into one of two groups. As the animals learned, the researchers recorded brain activity, hoping to understand how learning changes neural activity.
Nearly a decade later, Miller — alongside researchers from Dartmouth, including Dr. Anand Pathak and Prof. Richard Granger — gave the same task to a very different subject. It wasn’t a primate at all, but a computational model that the team wired to work like the real brain circuits that control learning and decision-making. Dr. Miller and his colleagues hoped it would produce patterns of neural activity similar to what they observed in the macaques. What they didn’t expect was that the model’s output would point them to something they had missed the first time around.
“We saw some peculiar brain activity in the model,” Miller says. “There was a group of neurons that predicted the wrong answer, yet they kept getting stronger as the model learned. So we went back to ... Continue Reading »
This article is an early look at our upcoming special issue on Mastery. Check back in on January 28 to catch the full issue.
After years of studies and six months in New York, I was convinced I’d mastered English. I was cracking jokes with American friends, binge-watching shows without subtitles, and even thinking in English half the time.
Then I moved to London for my first job at Google, and suddenly, I felt like I’d never truly master the language. Colleagues used phrases I’d never heard. Cultural references flew over my head. I found myself nodding along in meetings, pretending to understand jokes that left me completely lost. It felt terrible.
I was encountering the growing pains inherent to mastery, but everything I’d been told about getting good at something had set me up to misinterpret this growth as failure.
Our cultural narrative about mastery is not just incomplete. It’s actively misleading, and we’ve mythologized mastery in ways that make people quit right when they might be breaking into new territories.
The five lies we tell ourselves about mastery
The problem starts with how we ... Continue Reading »
You may think that denial can be harmful when encountering a challenge. But let me tell you about Richard Cohen.
When I was struggling with my eyesight, I read a book called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, by Richard Cohen. Cohen, who called the book a “reluctant memoir,” was diagnosed with MS at 25, survived two bouts of colon cancer, was legally blind for much of his life, and yet had an incredible, award-winning career as a war correspondent and journalist. He was married to journalist Meredith Viera for almost 40 years and was the father of three children. Sadly, he passed away in late 2024 after a struggle with pneumonia.
I had the chance to speak with Richard 20 years after I first read his book. He was a third-generation MS patient: Both his grandmother and his father had MS. What he learned by their example, especially his father, was not to allow himself to be victimized by the illness — to accept it and live with it rather than in spite of it. Indeed, his father, a physician, practiced ... Continue Reading »
One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is simply that, over the past couple of centuries, humanity has actually been able to make sense of much of it at a basic, fundamental level. We’ve determined what all of the luminous and light-blocking material, plus radiation, is made of: the normal matter and energy in our Universe that consists of particles within the Standard Model. We’ve discovered black holes and have come to understand how gravity and the expanding Universe works: governed by the laws of Einstein’s general relativity. And we understand the rules governing how particles interact: through the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces, as dictated by quantum field theory.
While these developments occurred both theoretically as well as observationally and experimentally, this picture has truly been cemented over the last 50 years by a large suite of data: collected from precise particle collider and detector experiments here on Earth, in space, as well as astrophysical and cosmological observations of the grand Universe. The Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the Standard Model of cosmology ... Continue Reading »
Every major technological shift arrives with bold promises of efficiency and productivity. The current wave of artificial intelligence is no different. The forecasts are breathless: tasks automated, workloads reduced, insights unlocked, entire sectors transformed. But behind the promises sits a neglected question: what will work actually feel like?
Efficiency projections tell us nothing about the emotional reality of daily working life. And those emotional realities determine whether people collaborate, innovate, stay in their roles, or quietly disengage.
In an era dominated by AI hype, we need a different lens to understand the future of work. That lens is happiness — not as a perk or a soft ideal, but as a dynamic, measurable signal of how well work is working. AI will transform what we do at work. But only human leadership will determine how it feels to do it. Tracking happiness is the compass leaders need to guide that transition.
The hype is clear: The emotional reality is not
The dominant AI narrative is astonishingly one-dimensional. It focuses on speed, output, and efficiency. Organizations want to know what can be automated, streamlined, or ... Continue Reading »
I’ve known a great many leaders in my time. Bosses, CEOs, heads, provosts, managers, politicians, coaches, supervisors, managing directors — whatever you call them, I’ve met my fair share of them. Some, I’ve known intimately. They are my friends, family, and close colleagues. Others I’ve watched from afar. Because it’s important to watch the leaders in our lives. According to Aristotle, it’s the only way we will learn.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that to be a good person doesn’t mean doing one or two good things but developing certain virtues that allow you to do good things. Doing a brave thing doesn’t make you courageous. Giving a compliment doesn’t make you kind. To be good is to practice — over and over again — until you transform your character. A good leader is no different.
To develop the character traits of a good leader, you must consciously work on yourself. Treat your choices as bricks and, over time, those bricks will form something wondrous. The question then becomes, how do I know what bricks to lay? What must I do ... Continue Reading »
From 2022 onward, JWST began revolutionizing our cosmic perspective.
This side-by-side view shows the same object, the Pillars of Creation, as captured by JWST in both mid-infrared light (at left) and in near-infrared light (at right). Note the different features revealed as far as stars, dust, gas, and other features within the nebula. Different wavelengths are sensitive to different types of features, including for features beyond the limits of JWST.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI)
Its spectacular early results broke records and inspired awe.
This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is the first full-color, multiwavelength science image taken by the JWST. It was, for a time, the deepest image ever taken of the ultra-distant Universe, with 87 ultra-distant galaxy candidates identified within it. Most are still awaiting spectroscopic follow-up and confirmation to determine how distant they truly are.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI; NASA/ESA/Hubble (STScI); composite by E. Siegel
However, ... Continue Reading »
In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing.
Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls that the moment the camera stops running, and the production crew whisks off the mics, guests will invariably ask the same thing: “How did I do?”
The need for validation
Of course, you are not the president of the United States. You are not a prince across the water. You are not a ... Continue Reading »
Starting on the night of January 19, 2026, planet Earth was treated to a global show that had only been seen once before in the 21st century: a spectacular auroral display that wasn’t triggered by a solar flare or by a coronal mass ejection, but instead by a completely different form of space weather known as a solar radiation storm. Whereas solar flares normally involve the ejection of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere and coronal mass ejections typically involve accelerated plasma particles from the Sun’s corona, a solar radiation storm is simply an intensification of the charged ions normally emitted by the Sun as part of the solar wind. Only, in a radiation storm, both the density and speed of the emitted particles get greatly enhanced.
We’re currently still in the peak years of our current sunspot cycle: the 11-year solar cycle that’s been tracked for centuries, where “peak years” see 100+ sunspots on the Sun while “valley years” see a largely featureless Sun. While several notable auroral displays have graced Earth in recent years, there’s only been one other severe ... 
In 2014, a team of neuroscientists, including Dr. Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave macaque monkeys a carefully standardized task: categorize visual dot patterns into one of two groups. As the animals learned, the researchers recorded brain activity, hoping to understand how learning changes neural activity.
Nearly a decade later, Miller — alongside researchers from Dartmouth, including Dr. Anand Pathak and Prof. Richard Granger — gave the same task to a very different subject. It wasn’t a primate at all, but a computational model that the team wired to work like the real brain circuits that control learning and decision-making. Dr. Miller and his colleagues hoped it would produce patterns of neural activity similar to what they observed in the macaques. What they didn’t expect was that the model’s output would point them to something they had missed the first time around.
“We saw some peculiar brain activity in the model,” Miller says. “There was a group of neurons that predicted the wrong answer, yet they kept getting stronger as the model learned. So we went back to ... 
This article is an early look at our upcoming special issue on Mastery. Check back in on January 28 to catch the full issue.
After years of studies and six months in New York, I was convinced I’d mastered English. I was cracking jokes with American friends, binge-watching shows without subtitles, and even thinking in English half the time.
Then I moved to London for my first job at Google, and suddenly, I felt like I’d never truly master the language. Colleagues used phrases I’d never heard. Cultural references flew over my head. I found myself nodding along in meetings, pretending to understand jokes that left me completely lost. It felt terrible.
I was encountering the growing pains inherent to mastery, but everything I’d been told about getting good at something had set me up to misinterpret this growth as failure.
Our cultural narrative about mastery is not just incomplete. It’s actively misleading, and we’ve mythologized mastery in ways that make people quit right when they might be breaking into new territories.
The five lies we tell ourselves about mastery
The problem starts with how we ... 
You may think that denial can be harmful when encountering a challenge. But let me tell you about Richard Cohen.
When I was struggling with my eyesight, I read a book called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, by Richard Cohen. Cohen, who called the book a “reluctant memoir,” was diagnosed with MS at 25, survived two bouts of colon cancer, was legally blind for much of his life, and yet had an incredible, award-winning career as a war correspondent and journalist. He was married to journalist Meredith Viera for almost 40 years and was the father of three children. Sadly, he passed away in late 2024 after a struggle with pneumonia.
I had the chance to speak with Richard 20 years after I first read his book. He was a third-generation MS patient: Both his grandmother and his father had MS. What he learned by their example, especially his father, was not to allow himself to be victimized by the illness — to accept it and live with it rather than in spite of it. Indeed, his father, a physician, practiced ... 
One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is simply that, over the past couple of centuries, humanity has actually been able to make sense of much of it at a basic, fundamental level. We’ve determined what all of the luminous and light-blocking material, plus radiation, is made of: the normal matter and energy in our Universe that consists of particles within the Standard Model. We’ve discovered black holes and have come to understand how gravity and the expanding Universe works: governed by the laws of Einstein’s general relativity. And we understand the rules governing how particles interact: through the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces, as dictated by quantum field theory.
While these developments occurred both theoretically as well as observationally and experimentally, this picture has truly been cemented over the last 50 years by a large suite of data: collected from precise particle collider and detector experiments here on Earth, in space, as well as astrophysical and cosmological observations of the grand Universe. The Standard Model of particle physics, as well as the Standard Model of cosmology ... 
Every major technological shift arrives with bold promises of efficiency and productivity. The current wave of artificial intelligence is no different. The forecasts are breathless: tasks automated, workloads reduced, insights unlocked, entire sectors transformed. But behind the promises sits a neglected question: what will work actually feel like?
Efficiency projections tell us nothing about the emotional reality of daily working life. And those emotional realities determine whether people collaborate, innovate, stay in their roles, or quietly disengage.
In an era dominated by AI hype, we need a different lens to understand the future of work. That lens is happiness — not as a perk or a soft ideal, but as a dynamic, measurable signal of how well work is working. AI will transform what we do at work. But only human leadership will determine how it feels to do it. Tracking happiness is the compass leaders need to guide that transition.
The hype is clear: The emotional reality is not
The dominant AI narrative is astonishingly one-dimensional. It focuses on speed, output, and efficiency. Organizations want to know what can be automated, streamlined, or ... 
I’ve known a great many leaders in my time. Bosses, CEOs, heads, provosts, managers, politicians, coaches, supervisors, managing directors — whatever you call them, I’ve met my fair share of them. Some, I’ve known intimately. They are my friends, family, and close colleagues. Others I’ve watched from afar. Because it’s important to watch the leaders in our lives. According to Aristotle, it’s the only way we will learn.
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that to be a good person doesn’t mean doing one or two good things but developing certain virtues that allow you to do good things. Doing a brave thing doesn’t make you courageous. Giving a compliment doesn’t make you kind. To be good is to practice — over and over again — until you transform your character. A good leader is no different.
To develop the character traits of a good leader, you must consciously work on yourself. Treat your choices as bricks and, over time, those bricks will form something wondrous. The question then becomes, how do I know what bricks to lay? What must I do ... 
From 2022 onward, JWST began revolutionizing our cosmic perspective.
This side-by-side view shows the same object, the Pillars of Creation, as captured by JWST in both mid-infrared light (at left) and in near-infrared light (at right). Note the different features revealed as far as stars, dust, gas, and other features within the nebula. Different wavelengths are sensitive to different types of features, including for features beyond the limits of JWST.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI)
Its spectacular early results broke records and inspired awe.
This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is the first full-color, multiwavelength science image taken by the JWST. It was, for a time, the deepest image ever taken of the ultra-distant Universe, with 87 ultra-distant galaxy candidates identified within it. Most are still awaiting spectroscopic follow-up and confirmation to determine how distant they truly are.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI; NASA/ESA/Hubble (STScI); composite by E. Siegel
However, ... 
In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing.
Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls that the moment the camera stops running, and the production crew whisks off the mics, guests will invariably ask the same thing: “How did I do?”
The need for validation
Of course, you are not the president of the United States. You are not a prince across the water. You are not a ...