Big Think · 实时热榜

A bolt from the blue that never strikes the same place twice: Lightning is the proverbial placeholder for the unpredictable. Nature’s light show erupts whenever and wherever positive and negative charges within a storm cloud collide with sufficient force. But if lightning is truly place-agnostic, why does it have a thing for cargo ships? Something odd in the skies above the strait Look at these paired maps of where the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea rub shoulders. The lower one shows a bri

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 Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks says he knows the real cause is featured on Big Thi

It’s no secret that, here on Earth in 2026, we’re more scientifically and technologically advanced than ever, and yet — with over 8 billion human beings presently on planet Earth — we’re arguably closer to causing our own self-extinction than ever before. Of the entire planet’s land surface (excluding Antarctica), just 23% of Earth’s wilderness remains . Since the start of the industrial revolution, our atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content has increased by over 50% of its initial value, driving g

Stress has a branding problem. Clinical psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues that most of us have the wrong relationship with discomfort entirely, treating stress like a malfunction instead of what it actually is: a signal that we’re growing. This video Psychologist: The blueprint for developing a healthy relationship with your emotions is featured on Big Think .

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

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

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.