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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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The manipulation of matter on an atomic and molecular scale
What's the Latest Development? Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang, graduate students working in the Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, have designed a textile that is not only water-repelling but self-draining. It's a combination of a hydrophobic fabric and water ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers from universities across the country, participating in a study for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), have found that two types of nanomaterials -- made from titanium dioxide and carbon respectively -- caused inflammation ...
What's the Latest Development? Families in rural Indian communities are currently helping to test a device that could provide them with an affordable and reliable source of safe drinking water. Developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the filtration system combines ...
What's the Latest Development? By incorporating technology that's over a century old, designers at Singapore-based Nanoveu have created a plastic protector whose unique construction could make 3D displays more commonplace among smartphone users. The EyeFly 3D, which hit the iOS market last week ...
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ...
We have all experienced “dehumanizing” technology – software or hardware that seems to diminish our ability to communicate with others or to function effectively in the world. Technology that creates new boundaries between people rather than erasing old ones. With this in mind, Big Think is ...
What's the Big Idea? Visit Gizmodo, Wired, TechCrunch, or Engadget, or talk to "epiphany addict" Jason Silva, and a bracing wave of techno-optimism will wash over you. The future, you'll feel, will be a place of seamless, harmonious interconnectedness in which humans, separated for millennia by ...
The Future Attribute Screening Technology project (FAST) was not dreamed up by Philip K. Dick, but it could have been. Lead by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the initiative aims to use sensor technology to detect cues "indicative of mal-intent," defined by the DHS as intent or desire to ...
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane visual landscape. The newest innovation comes from a joint venture between DARPA (Defense Advanced ...