Here in the United States, one of the greatest assets we have in our country — from a scientific standpoint, at least — is our collection of National Laboratories. A total of 17 labs presently exist, which focus on a wide variety of scientific, engineering, and energy-related endeavors. Many of these labs are places where fundamental science thrives, including:
Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhaven, where many fundamental and composite particle physics discoveries have taken place and where new experiments offer a window into fundamental reality,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were developed and where both nuclear science and explosives developments continue,
Argonne National Laboratory and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which have used physics and accelerator technologies to further the biological and biomedical sciences,
Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, which pioneer new avenues for energy generation, including (at LLNL) the National Ignition Facility, which recently surpassed the breakeven point in nuclear fusion research for the first time ever,
as well as many others, located all across the country. All of these labs, in addition to the ... Continue Reading »
Most of the decisions that shape a life don’t feel like decisions at all. They feel instead like expectations to follow a certain life – thrust upon us by parents, society, peers.
The cost of fulfilling these expectations is subtle but cumulative: fewer experiments, narrower options, and a growing sense that life is happening on someone else’s terms.
This video The psychological trap behind wanting your life to “make sense” is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
In the race to build superintelligent AI, high-caliber data is everything. Mercor, a data annotation startup, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in history by offering something most rivals don’t: expert-labeled evaluations that benchmark the capabilities of large language models.
AI evaluations (“evals”) are structured assessments that measure how well a model performs on tasks within specific domains. Instead of low-wage workers tagging data, Mercor hires doctors, engineers, lawyers, investment bankers, and other professionals to judge model outputs for quality and accuracy.
A software engineer, for instance, might evaluate code for security flaws or functional completeness, then design a rubric developers can use to benchmark improvement. Those rubrics become the scoring guides that machine learning engineers deploy to grade model responses, flag failures, and define what a “good” answer looks like.
Put simply: evaluations form the baseline that AI companies use to steer their models towards outputs they desire.
“We are in the age of AI evaluations,” Mercor co-founder and CEO Brendan Foody said on a September episode of Lenny’s Podcast.
Since launching in January 2023, Mercor has inked deals with frontier model ... Continue Reading »
The Well — December 16, 2025
A night where awe took center stage
Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe.
Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering — A Night of Awe and Wonder — was decidedly the latter.
The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on The Well, we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points.
Dacher Keltner, Professor, UC Berkeley / Credit: Mik Milman
Dacher Keltner opened the evening by grounding us in what we came for: awe itself. Not as mystical abstraction, but as a universal emotion backed by rigorous science. He framed why awe ... Continue Reading »
Every year, scientists around the world don’t just work to enhance what we know and increase our overall body of knowledge, although that’s indeed what they wind up doing. Part of the motivation for conducting science is hope: the hope that what you’re doing, research-wise, could end up revolutionizing how we conceptualize reality. Although we’ve come so far in understanding this Universe — including what its laws and constituents are at a fundamental level, and how those fundamental components assemble to create the varied and complex reality we inhabit today — we’re certain that there’s still more to learn, as many paradoxes abound and several important puzzles remain unsolved. With each new experiment, observation, and piece of data, there’s an opportunity for scientific advancement.
All too often, however, for better or for worse, what initially seemed like:
a mismatch between theory and observation,
a low-significance hint that, if confirmed, would contradict our consensus picture,
or a set of observations that supported a non-standard framework for the Universe,
appears to crumble or disappear as new, superior, and more comprehensive data was collected. Although there are always ... Continue Reading »
There are some people in life we feel compelled to listen to. There’s something about the way they deliver their message that draws us in. Interestingly, when we look deeper, the detail of what they say seems to be less important than their delivery and their ability to capture an idea in a simple way.
The world is full of influencers, politicians and celebrities that — when you scratch beneath the surface — have remarkably little to say but nevertheless have scores of people queuing up to hear them say it. Rather than get frustrated by this conundrum, we need to learn from it. In almost every line of work, whether we’re salespeople, managers or leaders, trying to influence our friends, our families or our boss, we want what those lucky few get: cut-through.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines cut-through as ‘success in getting people’s attention and influencing them’. The aim of a great pitch or presentation should be nothing more and nothing less.
Of course, you need to strive for more than just soundbites and clickbait. If there’s no substance to your ... Continue Reading »
Filmmaker David S. Goyer—the screenwriter behind The Dark Knight, Blade, and Foundation—shares the strange and awe-filled moments that shaped his life, from growing up at the “edge of the ordinary” to uncanny experiences in Israel and Tibet that were too powerful to ignore.
Speaking at A Night of Awe and Wonder, hosted by Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation, he explains how these encounters became the foundation of his storytelling. Goyer shows how awe helps us pay attention, stay open, and see meaning in moments we might otherwise overlook.
This video How life changes when you start embracing mystery is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
For millennia, supernovae were rare, once-per-century sights.
What appears to be a double-lobed nuclear explosion is actually the result of a rare astronomical outburst known as a supernova impostor: a precursor to a supernova, rather than the real thing. A “small” nuclear explosion occurred in the massive star Eta Carinae nearly 200 years ago, but the star continues to live on, inside, with the two expanding lobes shown here resulting from the aftermath of that outburst.
Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson), and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute, New York)
The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova occurred way back in 1604.
In 1604, a supernova appeared to skywatchers on Earth, between the constellations of Ophiuchus and Sagittarius. Known as Kepler’s supernova, on October 17, 1604, it made a brilliant “line” with Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn flanking it. It remains the Milky Way’s most recent naked-eye supernova, even today, more than 400 years later.
Credit: Sterllarium/InForum
But with modern astronomy, they’ve appeared all across the Universe.
As recently as 2019, there were only 19 published galaxies that contained distances as measured by Cepheid variable stars that ... Continue Reading »
All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium: ingredients that will participate in subsequent generations of star-formation.
For a long time, however, we’d made assumptions about where certain species of particles will and won’t form, and what types of environments they could and couldn’t exist in. Those assumptions were way ahead of where the observations were, however, and as our telescopic and technological capabilities catch up, sometimes what we find surprises us. Sometimes, we find elements in places that we didn’t anticipate, leading us to question our theoretical models for how those elements can be made. ... Continue Reading »
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
A generous helping of moral turpitude
Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster.
On the Future Map of North America by Gordon-Michael Scallion, three major seismic upheavals inundate most of the American West, as well as parts of the East Coast and much of the Mississippi and St Lawrence valleys, which are now connected via the Great Lakes (now a Great Sea). ... Continue Reading »
Here in the United States, one of the greatest assets we have in our country — from a scientific standpoint, at least — is our collection of National Laboratories. A total of 17 labs presently exist, which focus on a wide variety of scientific, engineering, and energy-related endeavors. Many of these labs are places where fundamental science thrives, including:
Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhaven, where many fundamental and composite particle physics discoveries have taken place and where new experiments offer a window into fundamental reality,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first atomic bombs were developed and where both nuclear science and explosives developments continue,
Argonne National Laboratory and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which have used physics and accelerator technologies to further the biological and biomedical sciences,
Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, which pioneer new avenues for energy generation, including (at LLNL) the National Ignition Facility, which recently surpassed the breakeven point in nuclear fusion research for the first time ever,
as well as many others, located all across the country. All of these labs, in addition to the ... 
In the race to build superintelligent AI, high-caliber data is everything. Mercor, a data annotation startup, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in history by offering something most rivals don’t: expert-labeled evaluations that benchmark the capabilities of large language models.
AI evaluations (“evals”) are structured assessments that measure how well a model performs on tasks within specific domains. Instead of low-wage workers tagging data, Mercor hires doctors, engineers, lawyers, investment bankers, and other professionals to judge model outputs for quality and accuracy.
A software engineer, for instance, might evaluate code for security flaws or functional completeness, then design a rubric developers can use to benchmark improvement. Those rubrics become the scoring guides that machine learning engineers deploy to grade model responses, flag failures, and define what a “good” answer looks like.
Put simply: evaluations form the baseline that AI companies use to steer their models towards outputs they desire.
“We are in the age of AI evaluations,” Mercor co-founder and CEO Brendan Foody said on a September episode of Lenny’s Podcast.
Since launching in January 2023, Mercor has inked deals with frontier model ... 
The Well — December 16, 2025
A night where awe took center stage
Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation gathered scientists, artists, and storytellers in Los Angeles to explore the power of awe.
Some events you attend. Others you experience. Our recent gathering — A Night of Awe and Wonder — was decidedly the latter.
The event, produced by Big Think in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation, set out to explore a simple idea: What is awe and how does it inform our lives, our work, and our purpose? In the interdisciplinary style you have come to expect from our work on The Well, we invited seven speakers and a musician to help us unpack the nature of awe from their vantage points.
Dacher Keltner, Professor, UC Berkeley / Credit: Mik Milman
Dacher Keltner opened the evening by grounding us in what we came for: awe itself. Not as mystical abstraction, but as a universal emotion backed by rigorous science. He framed why awe ... 
Every year, scientists around the world don’t just work to enhance what we know and increase our overall body of knowledge, although that’s indeed what they wind up doing. Part of the motivation for conducting science is hope: the hope that what you’re doing, research-wise, could end up revolutionizing how we conceptualize reality. Although we’ve come so far in understanding this Universe — including what its laws and constituents are at a fundamental level, and how those fundamental components assemble to create the varied and complex reality we inhabit today — we’re certain that there’s still more to learn, as many paradoxes abound and several important puzzles remain unsolved. With each new experiment, observation, and piece of data, there’s an opportunity for scientific advancement.
All too often, however, for better or for worse, what initially seemed like:
a mismatch between theory and observation,
a low-significance hint that, if confirmed, would contradict our consensus picture,
or a set of observations that supported a non-standard framework for the Universe,
appears to crumble or disappear as new, superior, and more comprehensive data was collected. Although there are always ... 
There are some people in life we feel compelled to listen to. There’s something about the way they deliver their message that draws us in. Interestingly, when we look deeper, the detail of what they say seems to be less important than their delivery and their ability to capture an idea in a simple way.
The world is full of influencers, politicians and celebrities that — when you scratch beneath the surface — have remarkably little to say but nevertheless have scores of people queuing up to hear them say it. Rather than get frustrated by this conundrum, we need to learn from it. In almost every line of work, whether we’re salespeople, managers or leaders, trying to influence our friends, our families or our boss, we want what those lucky few get: cut-through.
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines cut-through as ‘success in getting people’s attention and influencing them’. The aim of a great pitch or presentation should be nothing more and nothing less.
Of course, you need to strive for more than just soundbites and clickbait. If there’s no substance to your ... 
For millennia, supernovae were rare, once-per-century sights.
What appears to be a double-lobed nuclear explosion is actually the result of a rare astronomical outburst known as a supernova impostor: a precursor to a supernova, rather than the real thing. A “small” nuclear explosion occurred in the massive star Eta Carinae nearly 200 years ago, but the star continues to live on, inside, with the two expanding lobes shown here resulting from the aftermath of that outburst.
Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona, Tucson), and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute, New York)
The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova occurred way back in 1604.
In 1604, a supernova appeared to skywatchers on Earth, between the constellations of Ophiuchus and Sagittarius. Known as Kepler’s supernova, on October 17, 1604, it made a brilliant “line” with Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn flanking it. It remains the Milky Way’s most recent naked-eye supernova, even today, more than 400 years later.
Credit: Sterllarium/InForum
But with modern astronomy, they’ve appeared all across the Universe.
As recently as 2019, there were only 19 published galaxies that contained distances as measured by Cepheid variable stars that ... 
All across the Universe, stars are dying through a variety of means. They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium: ingredients that will participate in subsequent generations of star-formation.
For a long time, however, we’d made assumptions about where certain species of particles will and won’t form, and what types of environments they could and couldn’t exist in. Those assumptions were way ahead of where the observations were, however, and as our telescopic and technological capabilities catch up, sometimes what we find surprises us. Sometimes, we find elements in places that we didn’t anticipate, leading us to question our theoretical models for how those elements can be made. ... 
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
A generous helping of moral turpitude
Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster.
On the Future Map of North America by Gordon-Michael Scallion, three major seismic upheavals inundate most of the American West, as well as parts of the East Coast and much of the Mississippi and St Lawrence valleys, which are now connected via the Great Lakes (now a Great Sea). ...