International Big History Association

10/04/2026

Journal of Big History Volume IX Issue 4 2026

Global Periodization of World History: A Structural Model from Anthropogenesis to the Present
Дмитро Кротко {Dmytro G. Krotko}

Universal Basic Curriculum: Historical Structuralism, Big History, and Museums
Felipe Tirado

The Universal Algorithm: Physics Walls, Collective Solutions, and the Architecture of Complexity
Jason Prevett

What Kind of Universe do You Want?: Physical Laws, Life, and Humans
D.J. LePoire

Kingdoms and Climates: An Environmental Macrohistory of Bronze Age Egypt
Kieran Black

Theory of the Existence of Sustaining Volition
Sahriar Ahamed

Okinawan Musical Traditions in Argentina: Migration, Identity, and Collective Learning in Big History
Helen Kaibara & Zackary Campbell

The Spatial Morphology of Future History: Modeling the Environmental Invariants of Civilizational Expansion from the Planetary Trap to the Galactic Neural Network
Yang Xie (解扬) & Xiao Chen (陈骁)

Energy Competition as the Driving Mechanism for Civilizational Complexity Transitions
Chi Zhang

https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/issue/view/245

09/30/2026

The day the dinosaurs died.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1FRCan8LGC/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Episode #102 is out now: The Spring the Dinosaurs Died and the Fossil Fish That Told the Story, with the incredible paleontologist Melanie During!

Ray and Dave talk with vertebrate paleontologist Melanie During, who read the growth rings in fossil fish 🐟 from the Tanis site and pinned the death of the dinosaurs 🦖☄️to a single spring one fateful day 66 million years ago.

🔊 Listen now!
https://www.paleonerds.com/podcast/melanieduring

09/27/2026

Would be a good idea to keep a printout of this in your pocket if you need it.

09/05/2026

How should we think about this?

Quantum particles appear to change depending on how scientists measure them.

If researchers set up an experiment to detect wave-like behavior, a quantum particle behaves like a wave.

If they arrange it to identify the particle’s path, it behaves like an individual particle instead.

That raises a strange question: What was it before the measurement?

Albert Einstein believed the particle must already possess its own properties, even if scientists could not see them.

Niels Bohr argued that the answer depends on the experiment. According to his interpretation, some quantum properties do not become definite until they are measured.

Researchers in Brazil designed a new experiment to test this idea more directly.

They used nuclear magnetic resonance – the same underlying technology used in MRI scanners – to manipulate the nuclear spins of hydrogen and carbon atoms inside chloroform molecules.

The hydrogen nucleus acted as the quantum object being observed. The carbon nucleus acted as a switch controlling how the hydrogen nucleus would be measured.

One switch setting created an experiment that revealed wave-like behavior. The other revealed particle-like behavior.

The researchers then placed the carbon switch into a quantum superposition, allowing it to occupy both settings simultaneously.

This meant the measurement apparatus was no longer simply asking whether the hydrogen nucleus behaved like a wave or a particle. It was effectively asking both questions at once.

The team could then adjust the controller and track how the hydrogen nucleus changed throughout the experiment – not merely infer what it had done from the final result.

As the controller shifted between the two settings, the measured system also shifted between wave-like and particle-like descriptions.

The researchers called these “morphing reality states.”

Their results supported Bohr’s complementarity principle: wave-like and particle-like properties cannot be fully revealed by the same experimental arrangement, but both are needed to describe a quantum system.

This does not mean human minds create the universe.

In quantum physics, an observer can be a detector, another particle or any physical interaction that records information. Nobody needs to be consciously watching.

The experiment also does not prove that tables, planets or the Moon disappear when they are unobserved.

It suggests something narrower but still remarkable: at the quantum level, certain properties may not possess one definite, observer-independent form before they are measured.

earn more:
"Objective Reality Doesn’t Exist. It’s a Moving Target You Can Shape, Groundbreaking Research Suggests." Popular Mechanics

09/05/2026

Thanks Cosmological Astrophysics.

08/30/2026

At 7:26 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blasted off from the Florida coastline and sailed toward the stars. So begins its journey to capture deep, sweeping views of our universe, as far back as when it was only a few hundred million years old.

Named after the agency’s first chief astronomer, Roman is NASA’s latest and greatest cosmic cartographer. The $4.3 billion telescope will use its sharp infrared vision to chart billions of galaxies, as well as hundreds of black holes and the dusty disks circling young stars, where new planets form. It promises a panorama so wide and so crisp that it would take more than half a million high-definition TVs to display in full.

At a news conference on Saturday morning, Nicola Fox, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, explained that Roman’s vast gaze would contribute to solving some of the grandest mysteries about our universe, including how it works, what it is made of and if we are alone out there.

Astronomers will use data collected by Roman’s wide, deep gaze to study the dark universe and hunt for new worlds.

08/26/2026

Please join our free webinar: The Human Hive: Coordination Costs and the Suppression of Entities in Complex Social Systems

Complex social systems have undergone a series of discrete, historically contingent processes in which smaller social units possessing greater autonomy — families, communities, small polities, etc. — ended up absorbed into larger entities, mirroring a broader phenomenon this talk terms hierarchical integration: entities subsumed into larger complex objects, acquiring new functionalities through increasingly organic integration, as seen biologically in mitochondria, prokaryotes-turned-organelles, and multicellular organisms. In the social realm, this process has ethical costs: it entails the partial suppression of the autonomy, diversity, and agency of the units involved; this recurring tension between integration and suppression underlies episodes of both rising social complexity and eventual collapse. The talk argues that contemporary human societies, having long relied on institutions, violence, and culture to produce social conformity and to suppress individual volition and autonomy, now face escalating coordination costs and diminishing returns from these older mechanisms amid demographic concentration in megacities, political polarization, a growing incapacity to reach consensus on decisive issues, and the coordination and cohesion challenges posed by immigration and multicultural communities — which are, at once, the bedrock of a vibrant democracy and a source of significant sociopolitical strain. Algorithmic behavioral manipulation and, ultimately, AI-linked neural implants now appear as the potential spearhead of a new era of entity suppression and coercion into conformity, one whose risks to democracy, politics, and ethics are immense.

Daniel Barreiros is Full Professor at the Institute of Economics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). HE is former president and current vice-president of the International Big History Association (IBHA), coordinator of the Laboratory of History, Complexity and Evolution (IE-UFRJ), and a Full Honorary Member of the International Global Research Academy (Russia). His research focuses on historical studies of complexity and social collapse, evolution of human behavior, and the long-term dynamics of cooperation, conflict.

Date: Wednesday, September 16
Time: 2:00 p.m. EDT

Zoom Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85774872364?pwd=JififdYcquYqhWFhHoCeO9Cjp2IB75.1

07/30/2026

Issue No. 10 of Macrohistoria focuses on objects as vehicles for meaning, identity, and memory in Latin America. Through approaches drawn from comparative history, the history of the recent past, and even anthropology, this edition demonstrates once again that the Latin American historical experience involves shared issues requiring an expanded perspective. Authors from diverse regions explore themes such as relations with the United States, state violence against striking labor movements, the valorization of heritage, and the transnational construction of identity.

El número 10 de Macrohistoria gira en torno a los objetos como articuladores de sentido, identidad y memoria en América Latina. A través de ejercicios de historia comparada, historia reciente e incluso antropología, esta edición logra evidenciar, una vez más, que la experiencia histórica latinoamericana tiene problemas comunes que es necesario abordar desde una perspectiva ampliada. Ejes como la relación con Estados Unidos, la violencia estatal contra los movimientos de trabajadores en huelga, la puesta en valor del patrimonio y la construcción transnacional de la identidad son trabajados en este número por autores de diversas latitudes.

Publicado: 30-07-2026

Macrohistoria es una revista académica de acceso abierto enfocada en la historia global y latinoamericana, con artículos originales revisados por pares.

07/15/2026

Just published:
Complexity in Universal Evolution
A Big History Perspective

This book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of how complexity emerges, transforms, and accelerates across the entire 13.8-billion-year history of the Universe. It brings together chapters from leading researchers to explore the deep structure of complexity—from cosmic origins and planetary evolution to biological innovation, human development, civilizational dynamics, and possible future trajectories.

Notably, several chapters bridge multiple phases of Big History, providing valuable cross-disciplinary insights—such as comparisons between cosmic and terrestrial evolution and analyses of energy dissipation across physical and complex adaptive systems.

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of complexity’s manifestations and transformations across time and scale. By exploring these diverse topics, the book contributes to the broader field of Big History, deepening our understanding of complexity’s interconnected nature across the cosmos, life, and human civilization.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-20517-9