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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.
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Big ideas in the news from around the web
What's the Latest Development? Computer scientists and artificial intelligence experts say that a project to create digital roundworms represents an essential stepping stone toward the fusion of life and non-life. The project, called OpenWorm, is an opensource effort to elucidate the principles ...
What's the Latest Development? While only three percent of the world's surface is covered by urban landscapes, more than half of the human population lives in city environments. That's changing human culture as well as human biology, say genetic experts. "The spread of genetic diversity can be ...
What's the Latest Development? Pediatricians are encouraging children to play more video games, as long as those games run on consuls that depend on body movement, such as Xbox-Kinect and Wii, to move the game forward. A new study published in The Journal of Pediatrics has found that such games ...
What's the Latest Development? Biologists at Princeton and Johns Hopkins universities have created an artificial human ear—using a three-dimensional printer, no less—that detects sound better than natural human ears. "The technique lets scientists mimic the structural complexity of the ear ...
What's the Latest Development? University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo has found that social isolation hurts our ability to self-regulate, driving us to eat poorly and exercise less. "In one experiment, participants made to feel socially disconnected ate many more cookies than those ...
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? Researchers at several different organizations are working on delivery systems that will enable customers to receive packages while they are on the move. One of these systems, TwedEx from Microsoft Research, sends its parcels via a chain of individuals whose ...
What's the Latest Development? For their latest annual field trip to Indonesia's Wakatobi Marine National Park, University of Essex professor David Smith decided to try something new: He and his class dove 18 meters (59 feet) under the surface of the ocean, and then he conducted his lecture on ...
What's the Latest Development? Among many other culinary distinctions, Italy is known for its high-quality cured meats, which carry the unique signatures of the areas where they're created. However, many of them have been banned in the US for decades, often turning meat-loving tourists into ...
What's the Latest Development? This week iRobot, the maker of the military PackBot robot, announced that it had secured multimillion-dollar contracts with the organizers of next year's World Cup, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro and 12 nearby host cities in Brazil. Alongside thousands of ...
What's the Latest Development? Two veterans of the renewable energy scene, Mike Donnell and Tony VanMeeteren, are preparing to release their Solar Electric Scooter (SES) to people who offer at least $1,500 on the fundraising site When You Wish through May 22. The SES' riding platform is a ...
What's the Latest Development? IMRSV (formerly Immersive Labs) has moved from designing "smart" billboards that changed ads depending on the person watching them to creating software that can turn any video camera into an analytics tool. The software, called Cara, collects real-time anonymous ...
What's the Latest Development? According to a recent article in New Scientist, defense contractor Raytheon is working on developing a portable, reduced-range version of the crowd-dispersal military technology known as Active Denial. In its current form, it works by directing high-frequency ...
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? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a synthetic material that, when used to coat a device such as a heart valve or breast implant, prevents the body from rejecting it. The hydrogel is comprised of water and a special polymer that deflects all ...