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 science of genes and heredity has rapidly expanded as the result of the sequencing of the Human Genome
What's the Latest Development? A paper appearing in the online version of Cell this week describes the successful reprogramming of human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Scientists from the Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center figured out that ...
What's the Big Idea? If a so-called "gay gene" exists, what is the evolutionary logic for it? After all, you would expect that homosexuals would have fewer children than heterosexuals, so that any genetic cause of homosexuality would have been selected out of the gene pool a long time ago ...
In Voltaire's book Zadig, Or Fate, the titular character says that time “consigns to oblivion whatever is unworthy of being transmitted to posterity, and it immortalises such actions as are truly great.” In Midnight's Children, time is central as the title itself indicates. Salman Rushdie describes ...
The successful decoding of the human genome was a phenomenal scientific achievement. For the first time in the world’s history, the entire genetic code of the human species was fully available to scientific researchers. The fantastic accomplishment will provide untold advances in medicine and ...
"My guess is that the Y chromosome of every living man has spent at least one generation in the testis of a warlord," the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes once told The New York Times . One sexually prolific warlord in particular was Genghis Khan, whose Y chromosome is now found in 16 million men in ...
A new breed of legislation is sweeping the nation. 20 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, have legislation in place that employ ultrasounds as part of the abortion process. In ten of these states, the ultrasound is required, and in one of them, women must view the image and endure a ...
Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus macaques has added two more shared traits: the enjoyment of pornography and the worship of celebrities. Here’s ...
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 ...
What's the Big Idea? Gone are the good old bad old days in which Ethics was the lonely elective in B-school that no one elected to take. We've all heard about the new wave of humanitarian businesses – so numerous in fact that special legal designations have been created to incorporate the idea ...
What's the Big Idea? According to physician and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the major problem with health care in the U.S. is the country spends twice as much on health care as the average developed country and gets an outcome that is only half as good. Sponsored by: If we ...
What's the Big Idea? Will red wine really make you live longer? Does coffee strengthen brainpower or turn bones to dust? (Yes! No! Maybe.) For every scientific study proclaiming that something is good for you, there's an equally plausible study that says it will kill you. The reason, according ...