Neurobonkers | Big Think
A blog devoted to empirical science and the study of the mind. Expect to find critical analysis of scientific research, debunking of misinformation and tongue-in-cheek commentary based on cold hard evidence.
At the end of the Cold War, many thinkers optimistically predicted that globalization would cause global societies’ social values to converge around liberal notions of personal rights and freedoms. Since then, technology has made the Earth “smaller” than ever. Global trade delivers goods from one corner of the globe to the other. Airlines allow us to...
There are tons of theories surrounding J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and, more broadly, the fictional world of Middle-Earth in which the books take place. One of these theories is that Middle-Earth is actually not a fictional world at all, but our own Earth in prehistoric times, before — as historian Dan Carlin recently put it in his podcast...
About 15 years ago, I had what I’ll charitably call a crisis of confidence. After spending years successfully climbing the corporate ladder, I hit a wall. Hard. I had been on a pretty awesome professional trajectory for more than two decades, which included being named the youngest vice president and division general manager ever at an iconic, century-old...
In our Universe, the laws of physics tell us all the possibilities for what’s allowed to conceivably exist, but only by actually observing, measuring, and experimenting with our Universe itself can we determine what’s truly real. In Einstein’s general relativity, one of the very first possibilities that was ever discovered was for a black hole: a region...
There was no internet during the Enlightenment, but something surprisingly similar did exist in the 17th and 18th centuries. This was the Republic of Letters: a virtual, global community of scientists and intellectuals who exchanged information using the fastest technology available at the time — the postal service. 15,000 letters The clue is in the...
This week, I have the pleasure of sharing with you my Q&A with Lisa Kaltenegger about her new book, Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos. Lisa is a world-renowned astrobiologist and the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University. Earlier this year, we published a joint paper with Sara Vannah proposing a new...
Zbuduj własny kanał informacyjny
Gotowy, by spróbować?
Rozpocznij 14-dniowy okres próbny, karta kredytowa nie jest wymagana.