In a recent commencement address, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke offered ten suggestions to Princeton graduates ranging from “life is amazingly unpredictable...don’t be afraid to let the drama play out” to “call your mom and dad once in a while.” In between he offered some insights on the ...

“Workers of the world, unite!” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels bellowed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, largely in response to the Industrial Revolution (and Second Industrial Revolution) threatening not just the livelihoods but the very lives of many workers as profit reigned mercilessly over ...

What's the Latest Development? London-based junior doctors Kapil Sugand and Pedro Campos have created a system that displays 3D animated images of body parts on a large scale, giving medical students a whole new way to absorb information during a lecture. The system works through a type of ...

I think we should all take a moment to consider the news that everyone who continues to protest in Istanbul’s Taksim square is to be considered a terrorist. Let’s just consider what might happen if something similar ever happened in your home country. Now consider the implications of this in a ...

In the middle part of my book  Drunk Tank Pink I spend quite a lot of time talking about what the presence of other people does to us.  So would it matter, for example, if I’m playing chess against a computer or against a man or a woman or someone who’s tall or short or attractive or unattractive ...

Superman may have originally been envisioned as a telepathic bald villain bent on world destruction, but he was quickly transformed into a beloved hero of Depression-era America, with his all-American, Christian values of never doing wrong while always looking out for humanity. Christopher Nolan ...

Performance artist Erdem Gunduz, now dubbed"The Standing Man", has inspired his Turkish compatriots by taking a stand, literally. He stood silent and staring in Istanbul's Taksim Square for hours, as hundreds of fellow protesters, both those around him and across the country, joined him in his ...

Today, The New York Times Science Times section published an article, "Firebrand for Science, and Big Man on Campus", about the career development of Bill Nye (aka, The Science Guy) from a beloved children's entertainer to a zealous advocate for science. As the Times article notes, this change ...

We’re already used to describing our online social identity as a “digital tattoo” – something that we carry with us permanently wherever we go. So what if it were now possible to get a real-life digital tattoo that would extend our online social identity into the physical world as well? In its ...

It’s a fact of life in the 21st century that we’re all very busy. If you do a gut check on yourself, you’d likely admit that you are busier this year than you were last year. Every month seems to go by faster than last month, making us realize that the pace of life is accelerating, definitely not ...

There is a tendency for people to think science knows more than it knows. We hear phrases like "gaps in our knowledge" all the time, when in fact what we mainly have is knowledge in our gaps. The vastness of our scientific ignorance is especially evident when it comes to explaining how life ...

The anonymous author of the Big Think Neurobonkers blog has published a wee reply to my recent posts arguing that NSA leaker Edward Snowden should be prosecuted: To act on one’s conscience and leak information that is believed to be in the public interest is a noble choice. The ...