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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Weather at the extremes of the historical distribution
What's the Latest Development? A paper published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) details the challenges involved in what its authors call "climigration": the resettlement of communities that are losing their land due to the effects of ...
"Is this the future?" asked Bill Nye, aka, the science guy, on CNN this evening. Nye, of course, was referring to the tornado that devastated the area around Oklahoma City today, which is, of course, not an isolated extreme weather event. We have been witnessing storms of increasingly greater ...
What's the Latest Development? Over 32 million people were displaced by floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters in 2012, according to data released this week by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDRC), a group established by the Norwegian Refugee Council to track forced ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper published last week in Physical Review Letters suggests that cosmic rays could be the source of lightning generated during thunderstorms on Earth. Physicists Alex Gurevich and Anatoly Karashtin analyzed radio pulses from almost 3,800 lightning strikes in ...
By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) It is beginning to look like the 21st century may indeed turn out to be the “endgame of the human race,” as Arundhati Roy predicted in 2009. There is now near-universal consensus among scientists that the threat posed by global warming is severe and that if ...
How can you think cosmically about global warming? The first thing to do is appreciate how the Earth works, and that the Earth has been through many cycles of being hot and cold. The Earth has been frozen over like a solid snowball several times in the past. It’s been super-hot several times in ...
What's the Latest Development? Drought conditions in the US are worsening to the point where research meteorologist Martin Hoerling compares it to "the blob in the old Steve McQueen movie." Sixty-one percent of the country is experiencing drought, and that number climbs to 79 percent when ...
Let’s say you’re just now tuning in to reports that the world will end on December 21 when the Mayan calendar resets to zero. Maybe you’re one of the 35 million Americans who fear it will really happen. Maybe the prospect of solar storms, rogue planets and devastating floods is a welcome ...
Hurricane Sandy's the hurricane from hell. It broke all records. It was the storm of the century. It is the hurricane we will tell our grandkids about. But can it happen again? This depends on the science behind the storm. Hurricane Sandy was unusual because it involved the collision of three air ...
Just as there were many countries -- India, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, to name a few -- not mentioned in the "foreign policy" presidential debate last week, perhaps the greatest challenge facing the world -- climate change -- was another unmentionable topic, receiving lip service not once in all ...
It's going to take some time for science to catch up with what happened this past winter. For instance, a lot has been made of the "Meteorological March Madness" we just experienced, in which over 15,000 local, all-time warm-weather temperature records were broken across the U.S. What is ...
2012 is shaping up to be the year of the solar storm. In late January, the largest solar storm in years erupted, sending a cloud of particles streaming from the Sun toward Earth at 4.5 million mph. Now forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Center have issued a warning that another storm ...
The largest solar storm in seven years is expected to peak tomorrow, threatening GPS signals and the electrical grid. The cloud of particles streaming from the sun is headed for the Earth at 4.5 million mph and is set to hit us at around 9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow. The faster the radiation travels ...
“We don’t only have to worry about warming,” the physicist argues. “It could very well be the climate gets colder. Nobody knows”—and we waste time arguing when we should be preparing. Watch the video here: In the video below, Dyson talks about how he has responded to critics. When the ...
What's the Big Idea? Climate change deniers lost an important ally in 2011. They used to claim the Berkeley physicist Richard Muller among their ranks, although Muller claims to have been merely a skeptic, not a denier. Muller recently completed a David and Charles Koch-funded study that found ...