Big Think · 实时热榜

Intuition is having a moment. If you listen to podcasts or read nonfiction books, you’ll hear similar advice: trust your gut, listen to your body, follow your instincts. The trouble is that what we colloquially call “intuition” carries no label telling you where it came from. It can be based on expertise built over years. Sometimes it’s a cognitive bias wearing a convincing costume. Sometimes it’s just plain fear. So what is intuition, really? The research points to something more useful and les

If you were to break down the matter in our Universe to its smallest and most fundamental subatomic constituents, you’d find that everything was made up of individual quanta, each of which possesses both wave and particle properties simultaneously. If you pass one of these quantum particles through a double-slit and don’t observe which slit it passes through, the quantum will behave as a wave, interfering with itself on its journey and leaving us with only a probabilistic set of outcomes to desc

We call AI systems “agents” all the time. But what does “agency” actually mean? Alan Love, philosopher and professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, argues that biology offers a more careful way to think about goal-directed behavior, function, and, eventually, machine intelligence. From earthworms reshaping soil to organisms selecting between behavioral options, living systems reveal forms of agency that are easy to overlook — and difficult to reduce to simple stimulus-response behav

If you want to view the Universe in a way that takes us past our current frontiers, you only have a few options. You can build a larger telescope: with greater surface area to collect light and a larger diameter to increase your resolution. You can polish your mirror’s surface to be more reflective and smoother: down to nanometer-scale precision. You can keep it clean and pristine: reducing your noise. You can build improved adaptive optics systems : better correcting for the distortion of the a

“Some people will hate what I say,” the mathematician Marcus du Sautoy tells me, “because it’s all about unweaving the rainbow. Some people want to retain the magic and don’t want to know why something’s working. That’s fine. But actually, for me, you know, the rainbow becomes much more interesting when you understand what is happening to the light that makes the rainbow like that.” Du Sautoy , the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the Univ

In parts of West Africa, getting sick used to mean navigating a maze of barriers — distance, cost, time spent away from work — before ever seeing a health worker. Muso set out to change that. Working hand-in-hand with governments, they built a model where professional community health workers bring care directly to patients’ doors within 24 hours, at no cost. And because these health workers are from the communities they serve, trust in the new process is already built in; they’re not strangers

The Sun is so much more than a shining ball of energetic plasma. This incredible still image from the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) is the highest-resolution image of the Sun’s surface (i.e., photosphere) ever acquired. The image is taken at a wavelength of 416 nanometers, and showcases several features known to arise in fluid flow, such as the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Credit : NSF/NSO/AURA/MPS Its fluid surface is ocean-like: with plasma currents fl

You’re driving. Your phone is going off in the cupholder: three Slack pings, a text from your manager, an email stamped “URGENT” that is almost certainly not. Then your kid throws up in the back seat. It’s everywhere. Oh god, it’s everywhere. Now something — or namely, someone — actually needs you. There is at least one real emergency to deal with, and it involves a bucket and a mop, but your body has been treating the phone like a five-alarm fire for the last ten minutes, if not the last two we

Whenever you look at the Universe in a more powerful way than you ever have before, either in a new set of wavelengths, at higher sensitivity, on wider-field scales, or with novel capabilities, you open yourself up to a remarkable possibility. In addition to the “obvious” science gains that you’ll achieve from finding more examples and revealing greater details about the types of objects and events you already know about, you also give the Universe an opportunity to surprise you: by finding thin

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