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 customization of healthcare for the individual
We are moving from a multi-decade focus on killing ALL bacteria via soaps, detergents, antibiotics and hand sanitizer, to a new understanding of the complex bacterial system in our bodies and in the world around us. We now understand that humans are 90% microbial but only 10% human. The average ...
What's the Latest Development? Currently being tested at MIT's Media Lab is a system called Inside-Out that, true to its name, allows a person to visualize the emotional ups and down of a typical day. There are three main parts to the system: a biosensor embedded into a wristband, a smartphone ...
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 Latest Development? Parasites latch onto their hosts in many different ways, and one of them, Pomphorhynchus laevis, has inspired scientists to create a microneedle device that, when used for delicate skin grafts in particular, is both safer and considerably stronger than surgical ...
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 ...
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 ...
Imagine a drug that allows you to drink as much alcohol as you like, wake up without a hangover and never have to worry about developing a dependency. A new anti-alcohol intoxication medication has been identified by researchers who published their findings in the current issue of the Journal of ...
What's the Big Idea? The loss of a human limb is a tragedy. We know that once they’re gone, mammalian arms and legs can't ever be restored. But if you cut off a salamander's leg - or tail - it will reappear in just a few weeks. The enigma of amphibian organ regeneration has puzzled scientists ...
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 ...
Editor's Note: Over the next 12 days, Big Think will be running excerpts from all the lessons that make up our first online course, Great Big Ideas. During this period, we are offering discounted subscriptions to Big Think readers. You can now subscribe and gift this course for $99. Please sign ...
What's the Big Idea? In the first segment of our interview with Sonia Arrison, the policy analyst and futurist explained how, thanks to biotechnology and the coming longevity revolution, the average person may soon celebrate over 150 birthdays. Many Big Thinkers wondered whether lifespan ...
What's the Big Idea? In most species, the body of an organism loses its innate ability to heal over time (salamanders are a notable exception). While a kid can skin her knee and not even remember it two days later, an adult might feel the effects for weeks. But what do we really know about aging ...
What's the Big Idea? Less than one hundred years ago a routine bacterial infection could be a death sentence. The discovery of penicillin changed all of that. We're now on the verge of a similar revolution in medicine says Doug Melton, a biologist and co-director of Harvard’s Stem ...