science
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Lex Fridman makes room for the long answer
An AI interview show became a media business by widening the guest list and keeping the conversation long. Its useful trick: make hours of attention easy to enter, leave, and revisit.
The Thiel Foundation pays $250,000 to buy time before a degree
Peter Thiel’s foundation gives young builders two years, a grant, and a network. Its wager is that a few ideas deserve a head start on the usual career.
Big Think put experts on your screen. Now it wants a place on your desk.
The interview publisher has built a business around making expertise accessible. Its next chapter pairs workplace learning with a surprisingly old-fashioned product: a print magazine.
Sparx Learning Has a Homework Assignment for Schools
Millions of pupils use its maths, reading and science systems. Sparx’s bigger bet is that better routines - and teachers who can see what happens at home - make the difference.
Synthetic Sciences
Synthetic Sciences is a Y Combinator (W26) startup building AI co-scientists that run the full research loop - literature review, hypothesis generation, experiment design, code execution on GPUs, analysis, and publication-ready drafts. Founded in 2025 by Aayam Bansal and Ishaan Gangwani, the company pairs a research product (synsci, plus the open-source OpenScience workbench and the Atlas compute layer) with a thesis that proprietary research-process data is the path to scientific foundation models with genuine research 'taste'. Its biology mode reached 92% on the BixBench Verified benchmark.
Aeronaut Brewing Company
Aeronaut Brewing Company is a Somerville, Massachusetts craft brewery founded in 2014 by three grad-school roommates who brought MIT and Cornell science backgrounds to beer. Known for propagating its own house-cultured yeast and experimental recipes, Aeronaut pairs adventurous ales and lagers with a Somerville taproom that doubles as a food hall, live-music venue and community hub. In 2024 it merged with Dorchester Brewing Company under a new parent, Tasty Liquid Alliance.
The New York Academy of Sciences
The New York Academy of Sciences is one of the oldest scientific organizations in the United States, founded in 1817. A nonprofit professional society with more than 20,000 members across 100 countries, it convenes scientists, students, policymakers and the public to advance research, education and expertise. Its work spans flagship recognition programs like the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists and the Tata Transformation Prize, global STEM education through the Junior Academy and Global STEM Alliance, crisis-response coordination via the International Science Reserve, and the long-running peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Brilliant.org
Brilliant.org is an interactive STEM learning platform that teaches math, science, data, and computer science through hands-on problems instead of passive video. Founded in 2012 by Sue Khim, the San Francisco-based company has grown to roughly 10 million learners and operates on a freemium subscription model with 90+ guided courses.
Prisms
Prisms (legally Prisms of Reality) is a San Francisco-based education-technology company building the first spatial learning platform for K-12 math and science. Students don VR headsets and walk through problems - tsunamis, viral outbreaks, exponential growth - before ever picking up a pencil. Founded in 2020 by MIT-trained educator Anurupa Ganguly, the company now reaches hundreds of thousands of students across most US states.