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In the early 1980s, Mark Allen was on the verge of reaching the top of the triathlon world. He had the drive, talent, and a relentless work ethic built on the “no pain, no gain” mantra. Coming from a swimming background, his approach was simple: push as hard as possible every single day. To be fair, that strategy worked — up to a point. Allen placed in the top five of several races, proving that brute effort could take him far. But over time it became clear that it wouldn’t carry him all the way

From 50 commercials as a kid to nine seasons as one of the most recognizable characters on television, Jaleel White has always performed for an audience. Growing up on set, he learned that giving people what they wanted got you somewhere. So he kept doing it — with fans, with his mother, with anyone who had an expectation of him. After Family Matters ended, the work slowed and the identity he had built around it started to crack. He spent years as a single father taking whatever roles came. Now,

13.8 billion years ago, the most consequential event in our entire Universe occurred, as cosmic inflation came to an end and the hot Big Bang emerged in its aftermath. The conditions, at that moment, were that the Universe was filled with matter, antimatter, and radiation, and existed in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense, but rapidly expanding-and-cooling state. By the time we arrive at the present day, the volume containing our observable Universe has expanded to be approximately 46 billion light-years

Don’t believe the Kremlin. It claims that from 2020 to 2024, the Russian economy grew by 13%. Instead, believe the lights Russians leave on at night. They reveal the country’s GDP actually shrank by 8% over that period. So says Sweden’s foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard in a New York Times op-ed . Stenergard wasn’t entirely guessing. Sweden’s intelligence services arrived at that figure by measuring nighttime luminosity, an increasingly mature and rigorous branch of economic geography. Be

If you gather enough mass together in one place, as long as the individual particles inside aren’t moving too quickly, your mass will become gravitationally bound. If that mass is made out of atoms — particles that can collide, exchange energy and momentum, and stick together — then it can form a solid object as well. If the overall mass is great enough, you won’t just make a solid object that’s gravitationally bound, but you’ll reach a state that’s known as hydrostatic equilibrium: where your o

On a rainy afternoon in Dublin in 2017, I was running late to see a movie. I was going to see Logan , the final chapter in Marvel’s Wolverine saga, and I arrived at the theater just as the movie was about to begin. It had been billed as a story about a reluctant hero who had nothing left to believe in. Vanity Fair had called it a “bracing, violent jolt … raw, true.” What would it look like if everything were stripped away and all you were left with was the pain of your present? I was intrigued.

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

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

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

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

Physician Giulia Enders spent years studying the gut before realizing no organ works alone. Here, she walks through 5 body parts — the lung, the immune system, the skin, the muscles, and the brain — and what each one reveals about how we work, heal, and recover. This video Physician: The outdated mindset that gets in the way of our healing is featured on Big Think .

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 The science behind why boredom feels unbearable and how to create meaning is featured on Big Think .