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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
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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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Responding to climate change and environmental degradation
When it was announced early this month that Justice John Paul Stevens would retire from the Supreme Court, Grist’s Jonathan Hiskes published a green-themed take on the news with the sub-header: “The court loses an environmental rock star.” Stevens became a Supreme Court Justice in 1975 – just 13 ...
I’m not putting my money on this one—not yet. A new company called Zero Baggage goes live this November with the goal of weaning jet-plane America off of luggage. Their idea is to cut CO2 and get us all hooked us on “virtual luggage,” or rental clothes (some new, some “pre-loved") which you select ...
“If ants wrote a stage play for human characters, it would look like this,” writes Barbara Kingsolver of E.O. Wilson’s first novel, Anthill. In a powerhouse-eco-figures play, the New York Times has just had the author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle review larger than life biologist/theorist ...
Warming world, warming waters, coral reef die-off. You know the drill. But until recently, marine biologists knew relatively little about what exactly was going on, on the bacterial level, when coral reefs died off. Now, a group of scientists at Cornell have drawn up a mathematical model to ...
If you’ve spent time with an environmentalist in the past few years, you’ve probably had a conversation that went something like this: You: I’ve switched to organic peanut butter! After two months, it tastes normal to me. I feel like I’m protecting my health and saving the world! Crunchy: The ...
Unhappy news to banish the lingering Earth Hour glow from your cheeks: New York State is hemorrhaging environmental conservation jobs, and funding. Governor Paterson’s “winter of reckoning” (not altogether a bad idea, as Albany bears an $8.2 billion deficit) is hitting the environmental sector hard ...
Or better yet, turn them off, full stop – at 8:30pm tonight, Saturday, March 27, 2010 – and let jah moon come shinning in, into our life again. Singing, ooh, it’s been a long long time. I’ll stop now. The fourth annual Earth Hour – an hour of intentional, international darkness – organized by the ...
A new study conducted at Cornell University suggests that spending money on experiences (family vacation, massage, guitar lesson) rather than stuff (new flat screen TV, iPhone, set of china) actually can make consumers happier. A line graph would look like this: happiness resulting from spending on ...
Monday the 22nd, World Water Day, marked the launch of World Water Week 2010 – not a bad time to check in on the liquid state of things here on planet earth. Established during the United Nations Environment Programme’s 1992 conference in Rio de Janeiro, World Water Day takes a different theme each ...
Spring cleaning is upon us. Maybe this year, for you, that means a new paint job – if so, Grist’s Umbra Fisk has green advice for you in her eco-paint 101 video blog, recently posted online. Most conventional paints used today are chemical-based and unnecessarily toxic. They contain the VOCs ...
It’s around high school that girls start to fall behind in math. Up to that point, they do just as well and are just as interested, generally, but at about fifth grade, our school system’s approach to math tends to sort of stop doing it for them. Girls at that age respond well to very attentive ...
More evidence that Google runs the world: they’re planning your next bike ride for you. As of two days ago, their latest mapping feature includes bike lane tracking, so that you can log in from your computer or portable internet toy – I mean phone! – and find your best route in about .2 seconds ...
For the most part, the FDA doesn’t require that the chemicals used in your shampoos, lipsticks, deodorants, and other personal care products be tested. Does that alarm you? It should. Monitoring the toxic load of what we put on our bodies is just as important as monitoring what we put in them, and ...
Your kindergarten teacher warned you not to look directly at the sun, but not to worry: now you can listen to it sing, instead. Scientists have long tracked the intensity and patterns of the sun’s “wind” through the solar system and around planets (solar wind is essentially a stream of very ...
The weather outside may be frightful, but the planet is still warming, scientists are saying. Hard to believe when school systems across the nation are running out of snow days and DC has been buried for most of the winter, but according to a professor in Monash University’s Geography and ...