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If you stand here on the surface of the Earth, whether at the north pole where the acceleration is greatest or at the summit of Huascarán where it’s the smallest, you’ll be pulled toward the center of the Earth with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s² : the acceleration due to gravity, or “ 1 g ” on the surface of the Earth. Sure, there are tiny variations that will ensue, as your distance from Earth’s center, the speed of the planet’s rotation beneath your feet, and the density and composition of Earth

Every marriage’s disintegration is marked by the same four warning signs that researchers John and Julie Gottman can spot before a couple even finishes their first sentence. The founders of the Gottman Institute break down decades of lab research on why relationships collapse, and what to look for in a partner so they can make it 50 years by your side. This video These 4 behaviors predict divorce with startling accuracy is featured on Big Think .

Three people are sitting on a bench: a wise man between two fools. One fool is called “Pointless.” They argue that the universe is cold and uncaring to human needs. We can try as hard as we want and plan as long as we can, but at the end of the day, the world will have its way. A bullet, a disease, a speeding truck, a single sentence from a powerful person — they’ll each determine our lives, so trying to plan is pointless. The other fool is called “Control.” They say we are in charge of everythi

When you look at the Sun, the light you’re seeing isn’t the light that’s being emitted right now. Instead, you’re seeing light that’s a little more than eight minutes old, since the Sun is some 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away, and light — although it’s fast — can only travel through the Universe at a specific speed: the speed of light. But what about gravitation? Everything on Earth experiences the Sun’s gravitational pull, but is the gravity that the Earth experiences as it orbit

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 .

In my decades of playing soccer, I’ve taken part in hundreds of games. I’ve played in games where we dominated and lost. I’ve played in games where we were awful yet somehow scraped through to win. I’ve played in games where the other team cheated the whole way through with time-wasting, shirt-pulling, hacking people down at the knees (picture Paraguay’s shithousery against France in the World Cup) and still walked off winners. I hated it, but the result said they were the better side. Is that t

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

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. But sometimes it’s a cognitive bias. And sometimes it’s just fear. So it’s worth asking what intuition really is. The research points to something less vague and more useful th

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