We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
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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The way we will grow and eat food in the future in order to meet the demands of a growing population
What's the Latest Development? It's a long way from a "Star Trek"-style replicator, but the 3D printer engineer Anjun Contractor used to print a square of chocolate got the attention of NASA, and now he and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, have been given $125,000 to ...
What's the Latest Development? A tool that's currently being used in universities is increasing awareness of the connection between hazardous forms of nitrogen and an individual's lifestyle choices. The N-Calculator, originally created by scientists in the US and the Netherlands and recently ...
Consider this scenario. Due to protectionist trade policies, you pay 41 percent more for sugar than the rest of the world, and yet you tend to consume it not as the kind of natural sugar that is found in breast milk, but in the form of processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup. You make a ...
We are in the midst of the single biggest global epidemic of chronic disease in the history of human species. We will spend 47 trillion dollars over the next 20 years dealing with it. 90 percent of people who have it are not diagnosed, and in America alone it affects one half of the population ...
NYU Bio-ethicist Matthew Liao has caused a stir recently with a forthcoming paper that explores the biomedical modification of humans in order to stop us from consuming red meat. Liao is no stranger to controversy. He is known to Big Think readers for his dangerous idea that people should be ...
What's the Big Idea? Over the last two weeks, pink slime has become the safe food movement's equivalent of the Kony 2012 campaign. Over 200,000 people have signed an online petition to ban the use of what the food industry calls "lean beef trimmings" in school lunches. Larger questions have been ...
Using human stem cells to tackle human health issues remains controversial in the United States, but a team of Dutch researchers has found a potentially crowd-pleasing application of stem cell technology: growing a hamburger in a Petri dish. The full burger isn't ready for the grill just yet, but ...
It’s time to deregulate the organic industry. No… I’m not suggesting we let it become a free-for-all. What we have right now is a free-for-all because the industry relies exclusively on record-keeping instead of field testing. This must change. It only stands to reason that organic farms should ...
What's the Big Idea? Ferran Adrià, avant-garde chef of the famed restaurant and gastronomic think tank El Bulli (which closed in August 2011 to make way for the even more exciting El Bulli Foundation), does not eat beetroot and yogurt ice-cream lollipops every day. But he does eat well. And he ...