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Our Solar System has gas giants, rocky planets, moons, asteroids, and more. By size, it’s clear that the gas giant worlds vastly outstrip any of the terrestrial planets, and this is true for mass as well. Although Saturn is nearly the same physical size as Jupiter, it contains just 21% of the planetary mass in the Solar System, compared to Jupiter’s whopping 71%. Mass is the largest factor in determining whether a planet has an atmosphere or not, but other factors such as temperature, history, a

It’s easy to criticize how someone else does their job, but it’s a lot more difficult to actually do that job properly. In July of 2026, the Trump administration released their vision for remaking the USA’s scientific infrastructure, as the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published their document, Science: A New Golden Age . I went through the document and gave a full summary of the impact it will have on science and scientists in the United States. But one thing that my analysis

Does life have a purpose? Philosopher Alan Love argues that the answer is not as simple as yes or no. From birds that fake a broken wing to protect their young to cancer cells pursuing their own agency inside a larger organism, Love examines how purpose, function, and goal-directed behavior appear across different scales of life. For him, the better question is not whether purpose exists, but what kinds of purpose biology can identify, document, and explain. This video Your life has purpose — ju

We’re only halfway through 2026, and already, the year has been filled to bursting with amazing books on any subject you’d care to learn about. Our book coverage alone has run the gamut, touching on subjects as diverse as mental health, dinosaurs, social connections, chaos theory, love, Greek myths, science fiction, and economies. And then there were the many histories about things like war, colors, soccer, medical myths, information technology , and politics ( so much politics). As we enter the

We see our Universe as it is today: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Because of how quickly and how long it’s been expanding and cooling, the Universe is now sparse, possessing less than 1 proton per cubic meter of normal matter on average. Dark matter and dark energy, not normal matter, dominate our Universe’s contents today, and the expansion rate is much lower, around 70 km/s/Mpc, than it was at earlier times. The cosmic microwave background, or the Big Bang’s leftover glow, is a mere 2

Arthur Brooks studies happiness for a living, and he says the epidemic of depression and anxiety among young adults comes down to one culprit: a meaning crisis. Brooks walks through the biology of falling in love, the real formula behind human suffering, and why a Harvard study spanning 85 years found deep relationships to be the single strongest predictor of a happy old age. This video Understanding our modern crisis of meaning is featured on Big Think .

“Hey, Yang, where’s my thousand bucks?” It’s a question entrepreneur and political commentator Andrew Yang hears a lot. So often, he turned it into the title of his new memoir, Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? and Other True Stories of Staggering Depth . It’s not a bad question to ask. Universal basic income (UBI) was a core talking point of Yang’s energizing but ultimately unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, as well as his run for mayor of New York two years later, where he hoped to te

Born in the U.S. and taken to Korea after her father’s deportation, comedian Margaret Cho grew up between cultures, experienced sexual assault at a young age, and came of age in her parents’ gay bookstore during the AIDS crisis, where loss and public rhetoric left a lasting mark. Cho’s comedy career started at age 15, and she later became the star of the ’90s sitcom All-American Girl , where she faced intense industry pressure around her body and public image. Years later, she began confronting

For a great many people in the world, the hardest words to say are simply these three: “I was wrong.” It’s as though simply admitting you were mistaken about something — even though the only way we learn is by making an attempt, often resulting in a sub-optimal outcome, especially when you’re doing it for the first time or with incomplete knowledge — is somehow a personal failing, or even an admission of defeat. Even if the evidence is overwhelmingly decisive that your idea or conception is unsu

If you’ve ever been on a long-haul flight, you’ve likely suffered the consequences of disrupting your circadian bodily rhythm. Usually, for a day or two, your mood will plummet, your body will ache, and your mind won’t be as sharp as normal. To remedy jet lag, you might take steps to recalibrate. An early night. A nourishing meal. Surprisingly, plants can also experience the discombobulating aspects that we feel with jet lag. Like a wide range of biota, plants use internal biological clocks to s

The confluence of two cultures is always fraught with misunderstandings, miscommunications, and misinterpretations. But perhaps no case exemplifies this more fully than that of the Yanomami. In 1968, the Yanomami were catapulted to global fame after the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his shocking, compelling and highly controversial book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People . The first 13 months of fieldwork had been pure culture shock — his earliest encounter had been with a househo

During most years, a report from the director of the OSTP — the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — wouldn’t be a topic that made national news. Established by Congress in 1976, it’s simply an advisory position: where the appointed director, colloquially known as the science advisor to the President (previously an unofficial position), makes recommendations about science and technology, regarding both domestic and international matters. Normally, a scientist serves in that posi