Promising personalized cancer vaccines were a recurring theme at the American Association for Cancer Research’s (AACR) Annual Meeting in San Diego, earlier this month. A multitude of companies are pushing forward with shots designed to help the immune system fight patients’ speci … | Continue reading
In 1796, President George Washington lambasted political parties for allowing “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to “subvert the power of the people.” His indictment seems brutally timely today, just a few months after 147 Republican US congress members publicly challenge … | Continue reading
Using lasers and metal powder, Australian scientists have created a super strong, super lightweight new “metamaterial” — but they got the idea for this sci fi-sounding creation from plants. The challenge: Materials that are strong yet lightweight, such as carbon fiber and graphen … | Continue reading
At roughly 11:19 a.m. on April 20, 1999, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold emerged from their vehicles in the parking lots of Columbine High School. Clad in black trench coats, they started strolling toward the school entrance. Klebold lobbed a pipe bomb. Then … | Continue reading
I have a friend at work; she’s kind of a friend, but only ever a “work friend.” We have lunch together and get along, but nothing more. Lately, she’s started to spend our lunch breaks ‘trauma dumping’ on me. I don’t mind venting or offloading, but this is more than that. It’s too … | Continue reading
The quest to build a robust pipeline of high-potential leadership talent is increasingly urgent as the challenges facing organizations gain in complexity and speed. However, the current leadership gap illustrates how difficult that quest can be. One crucial question must be addre … | Continue reading
Failing is cool at the moment. This is an era of reframing. A setback isn’t bad; it’s a learning experience. An obstacle shouldn’t bother you; it’s an opportunity to grow. If you’ve read any self-help article written in the last five years, you will often find, at some point, the … | Continue reading
One thing you can be sure of, as you measure and observe the Universe around you, is this: the physical objects you see, touch, and otherwise interact with all occupy a volume of space. Whether in the form of solid, liquid, gas, or any other phase of matter, it costs energy in or … | Continue reading
Paper is to news what vinyl is to music: an outdated medium decimated by its digital replacement. Except that vinyl records have finally found their niche, and sales are up again. Newspapers haven’t yet worked out how to deal with all the advertising money that has fled online, a … | Continue reading
The development of a Smart City in Toronto, in partnership with Google, should be the realization of the tech utopia we’d been imagining. Complete with robots, autonomous cars, and the latest tech integrated into the city itself, it seems as if the residents are the lucky benefic … | Continue reading
You’ve likely heard the phrase “set and setting” when it comes to psychedelics: The quality of a trip depends on the mindset you have and the environment you’re in when you kick off a trip. But while it’s a common claim, there hasn’t been much research on the effects of set and s … | Continue reading
Whenever we think about the Universe at a fundamental level, there’s always the temptation to wonder if reality might somehow be simpler than we perceive it to be. As complex and diverse as the natural world is, it’s humbling to recognize that everything we see, perceive, and int … | Continue reading
In the not-so-distant future, the surgeons who treat our ailments might be tiny machines that swim through our bodies, tracking down cancerous tumors or clearing clots from even the smallest arteries. If this sounds like science fiction, you’re not wrong: Movies like Fantastic Vo … | Continue reading
Philosophy can often seem overly concerned with terribly abstract questions, such as whether chairs truly exist. However, the questions of philosophy cover all areas of human interest. Perhaps most importantly, several philosophers have spent time on the question of how to live a … | Continue reading
The most dramatic scientific progress occurs when a new window into the Universe gets thrown open. When I was a graduate student, for example, I was taught that Earth was born hot and dry. Any water present at our planet’s formation got boiled away. So, because the only window we … | Continue reading
Trust in science has declined. According to Pew, the share of Americans who say they have “a great deal of confidence” in scientists has fallen (from 39% in 2020 to 23% today). The view that science has positively impacted society has also tumbled (from 73% in 2019 to 57% today) … | Continue reading
In all of physics, some of the most important properties inherent to the Universe itself are constants of nature. The speed of light in a vacuum, the strength of the gravitational force between two masses, and the constant inherent to the quantum nature of the Universe, Planck’s … | Continue reading
Every culture has a story of the eschaton: the end of time. In Norse mythology, the world will end in an epic battle called Ragnarök, with gods fighting the Ice Giants. In Christian lore, the book of Revelations says the final battle will happen at Armageddon. Even modern science … | Continue reading
“I recently met a guy on a dating app and we went on a few dates. He was nice enough, and there were no red flags, but after the fourth date, I could tell things weren’t clicking, at least for me. Last week, he sent me a text inviting me to a group outing to meet some of his frie … | Continue reading
“I’ve got two kids — 3 and 7 — and I’ve done a pretty good job at not swearing around them. We went on the bus last Tuesday, and two middle-aged men got on next to us. They started dropping F-bombs and other obscenities for 20 minutes straight. I was shocked. Genuinely shocked. I … | Continue reading
“I work for a PR company. It’s big enough that you’d know it. I’m really good at my job. That’s not arrogant. It takes me 30 minutes to do things my colleagues take half a day to do. In my mind, they are inefficient and/or not that good at their job. I often resent and moan to my … | Continue reading
Staying current and competitive with AI will not only require an eye on the horizon for future trends, you’ll also need a vision that extends beyond the initial stages. You’ll need to build a long-term strategy around your AI goals to drive growth and efficiency through your inno … | Continue reading
One of the most enduring ideas in all the Universe is that everything that exists now will someday see its existence come to an end. The stars, galaxies, and even the black holes that occupy the space in our Universe will all some day burn out, fade away, and otherwise decay, lea … | Continue reading
Denis Villeneuve wasn’t the first person to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune for the big screen, but he is the first to have done so successfully. In the 1970s, the Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky came close. He handed art design to renowned com … | Continue reading
Join Barbara Oakley as she delves into the concept of “Einstellung,” a psychological phenomenon where our brains become stuck in one way of thinking. Oakley explains how this tendency to stick with what we know from an early age narrows our cognitive abilities, as unused brain co … | Continue reading
We all learn from our mistakes (eventually) but sometimes it would be nice to get it right the first time. Looking back from the more experienced end of my career, and having played most of the major roles around a boardroom table, I now have a good deal more clarity about what i … | Continue reading
In one of the most monumental discoveries of the 20th century, we learned that the Universe is not simply a static, unchanging background, but rather that space itself expands as time marches on. It’s as though the very fabric of the Universe itself is stretching so that distant … | Continue reading
People across the world are becoming increasingly concerned about climate change: 8-in-10 people see climate change as a major threat to their country.1 As I have shown before, food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is rightl … | Continue reading
Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning to build a $100 billion data center and supercomputer that could lead to the creation of AIs far more capable than anything possible today. Power hungry: Soon after investing its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft set out … | Continue reading
As AI continues to advance, one major problem has emerged: “hallucinations.” These are outputs generated by the AI that have no basis in reality. Hallucinations can be anything from small mistakes to downright bizarre and made-up information. The issue makes many people wonder wh … | Continue reading
Billions of people around the world dutifully brush their teeth with toothpaste every day, but some are starting to question this status quo. These contrarians see sense in brushing but aren’t sure whether the paste is really necessary. And it’s not just laypersons wondering out … | Continue reading
Let our sponsor BetterHelp connect you to a therapist who can support you – all from the comfort of your own home. Visit https://betterhelp.com/bigthink and enjoy a special discount on your first month. Is polyamory a sustainable model for societies? Do partners really need to ma … | Continue reading
Arseny Moskvichev dreams of the day he can have a meaningful conversation with artificial intelligence. “By meaningful, I mean a conversation that has the power to change you,” says the cognitive and computer scientist. “The problem,” says Moskvichev, “is that LLMs are complete a … | Continue reading
The new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, based on Cixin Liu’s epic science-fiction trilogy, reignites an old debate among researchers concerned with the possibility of extraterrestrial communication. In the fictional account (spoiler ahead!), the trouble starts when one of the char … | Continue reading
Imagine two anthropologists, Willard and Orman, who stumble over some never-before-seen tribe. There is the usual first-contact kind of behavior: pointing, laughing, and frustrated misunderstandings. It becomes apparent that the anthropologists need to decipher this tribe’s langu … | Continue reading
The Universe is a vast, wondrous, and strange place. From our perspective within it, we can see out for some 46 billion light-years in all directions. Everywhere we look, we see a Universe filled with stars and galaxies, but are they all unique? Is it possible, perhaps, that if y … | Continue reading
Picking a few books to characterize an entire intellectual tradition is tough. That’s because, in my view, history isn’t driven by “great men” like the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle thought. On the contrary, history is the product of many social, economic, political, cult … | Continue reading
Perhaps the most bizarre property we’ve discovered about the Universe is that our physical reality doesn’t seem to be governed by purely deterministic laws. Instead, at a fundamental, quantum level, the laws of physics are only probabilistic: you can compute the likelihood of the … | Continue reading
Do not annoy the gods. If there’s one lesson classical mythology teaches us, it’s that you should know your limits and mind yourself. Beware of hubris: the act of boasting arrogance and self-aggrandizement that man pitches against God, the gods, or the forces of nature. It’s stic … | Continue reading
Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of things — no longer the Richter scale, by the way, but the Moment Magnitude Scale — … | Continue reading
Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change. Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers ar … | Continue reading
The practice of “quiet quitting” isn’t anything new. In the cult satirical movie Office Space, protagonist Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston, had quietly quit his job at the fictional corporate hellhole Initech long before the story even started. As he admits, his typical d … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that there is a seemingly endless string of problems to address in the world. You don’t have to look hard to find people suffering from all sorts of maladies: from illness to injustice, from war to famine, from poverty to pollution. There are some major problems fa … | Continue reading
A recent survey found that two-thirds of workers believe that by 2035 workers will have an edge in the labor market if they’re willing to have performance-enhancing microchips implanted in their bodies. Technologically enhanced humans have a rich history in science fiction, but t … | Continue reading
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015 science fiction novel Children of Time, a planet-wide evolutionary biology experiment goes wrong. Well, wrong from a human perspective. Instead of creating intelligent monkeys, the experiment results in intelligent spiders that become spacefaring. A c … | Continue reading
Stanislaw Lem’s first-contact novel Solaris (1961) is the Polish writer’s most celebrated and enduring legacy. It features an ocean planet that conjures up life with no apparent purpose, at best perversely reflecting human wounds and desires. Unintelligible, alien, and therefore … | Continue reading
We do this all the time in the lab. At so many junctures in our work, something takes an unexpected turn, or a solution stubbornly eludes us. We try to use those moments to refocus our attention and press on with renewed energy. We continually have to “pinch past” our perceptions … | Continue reading
The world now sits on the precipice of transformational change driven by the emergence of new technology. Perhaps counterintuitively, as this transformation carves out a very special and complementary place for human neurodivergence, it will serve to powerfully elevate the crucia … | Continue reading