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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Videos from Big Think experts
Nanophysicists have the most fun, or at least some IBM researchers do. The nanocinematographers (that's right, we just made up that word) used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of molecules and make a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. ...
We spend the first year of a child's life teaching him or her to walk and talk "and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down." So quips Neil deGrasse Tyson, who says this approach, in which "everything is a don't," gets in the way of a child's natural curiosity. So get out of ...
After enduring years of misery, Jason Collins is now the first openly gay athlete in a major American professional sport. And yet, Collins is not technically the first. John Amaechi was closeted during his professional career, but he came out after he retired in February, 2007. Amaechi told ...
"I don't like Sputnik moments," says the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After all, if you experience a "Sputnik moment," it means you are playing catch-up. That's the situation the U.S. faced after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space in 1957. NASA was created in response ...
Flipperbot, the robot in the video below, was designed to test how sea turtles and other real-life organisms move outside the water. Flipperbot walks and crawls on complex surfaces to give researchers a better understanding of how a baby sea turtle can navigate tracks of beach sand. As it turns out ...
Everything is a bit more complicated in space. For instance, try wringing out a wet towel. That's what Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield does in a microgravity experiment in the video below. Watch as the water squeezes out of the cloth and runs along the surface of the cloth and onto ...
If you missed the White House Science Fair today -- which you probably did -- you can see the rebroadcast below, featuring hosts LeVar Burton and Bill Nye. Here's why this is worth watching. In case you were worried about the state of science education in the U.S., this video will give you a ...
People always think of environmentalists "being granola or hippyish or even snobbish," says the photographer Roger Moenks. "They never really think of it like being cool or in the frontline of pop culture." And so Moenks turned his talents to change all of that. His new multimedia platform and ...
"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes the philosopher/cognitive scientist/neuroscientist Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In the video below, Noë tells us that, paradoxical it sounds, "just because something does enter our eyes, provides a stimulus to the nervous ...
Add two more planets to the small but growing list of candidates that might host intelligent life in the universe. Kepler-62 is a sun-like star some 12,000 light years away in the constellation Lyra. Within the Kepler-62 system are two planets that fall within the so-called "Goldilocks Zone," or ...
Given that there is a lack of consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that we don't know much about raising special children. So parenting in many ways is a crap shoot. Andrew Solomon makes this observation in his book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the ...
Warm sunny days make us optimistic, but also impatient and aggressive. As a result, both financial markets and crime go up when the sun is out. When a room is dimly lit, we are more inclined to act dishonestly. On the other hand, we tend to behave ourselves when exposed to blue light, which we ...
The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has had his moments of doubt, about both himself and about the future of the human race. Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, 50 years ago. As a result, he told an audience of doctors at a stem cell laboratory yesterday, Hawking became ...
Time was when being an entrepreneur or an achiever, was something that was frowned upon by "the snobs at the top and those who where envious at the bottom," says Jeffrey Archer, the former member of Parliament and author of Prison Diaries. Margaret Thatcher changed all of that, Archer says, who ...
What's the Big Idea? "I’ve been working with 3-D printers since the late ‘80s," says Hod Lipson, the co-author, along with Melba Kurman, of the new book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Up until about 2005, however, "this technology was mostly locked in very expensive machines ...