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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? Since January of this year, when the National Center for Health Statistics published a meta-analysis of 97 health studies, including 2.9 million people, suggesting that overweight individuals are 6% less likely to die than are those of "normal" weight, public ...
What's the Latest Development? Food has become a secondary activity in American life, says Michael Pollan, perhaps the country's most popular food writer. The amount of time we dedicate to eating each day, ironically, has steadily fallen. "The family meal, or 'primary eating', is in decline ...
What's the Latest Development? Silicon Valley companies of all sizes are increasingly cutting employees' landline cords and exhorting them to use mobile phones and tablets in their stead. Google gave Android smartphones to most of its 53,000 workers, and the 15 staff at Schematic Labs are ...
What's the Latest Development? At the end of the 2013 fall semester, the University of Colorado at Boulder will see its first engineering student graduate from its GoldShirt program, which gives selected students an extra year of preparatory courses before admitting them to the regular ...
What's the Latest Development? A Consumer Reports study revealed that last year, 78 percent of parents helped create their kids' Facebook pages, and 7.5 million users were younger than 13, the minimum age requirement for having an account. Amy Jo Martin, CEO of social media strategy and ...
What's the Latest Development? A small but growing number of aging baby boomers, primarily women who don't have or don't live near children and younger relatives, are choosing group housing in which they live together, share expenses, and provide extra social support. Bonnie Moore opened her ...
What's the Latest Development? Recent class action lawsuits and settlements against major social media sites highlight some of the big problems with typical terms-of-service contracts and the customer's understanding of them. In response, writer Ari Melber, law professor Woodrow Hartzog, and ...
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? At last weekend's 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire, pediatrician and pain researcher Amy Baxter gave a lecture on Buzzy, a bee-shaped device she created that, when applied to a patient who's about to receive an injection, uses its built-in vibrating motor and ice pack to ...
What's the Latest Development? California-based UberMedia has launched UberAds, a platform that sends ads to customers' mobile devices based on their publicly-available social media data -- from sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest -- as well as their (optional) GPS location. Using this ...
What's the Latest Development? US military officials report that hypersonic weapons -- which would fly at more than five times the speed of sound -- could be available as soon as 2025, given current research and development progress. Earlier this month, the Air Force/DARPA experimental X-51A ...
What's the Latest Development? It's a long way from a "Star Trek"-style replicator, but the 3D printer engineer Anjun Contractor used to print a square of chocolate got the attention of NASA, and now he and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, have been given $125,000 to ...
What's the Latest Development? When it comes to accurately observing levels of artificial night sky brightness, also known as skyglow, human eyes are just as good as satellites, according to a new study published in the open access online journal Scientific Reports. Researchers looked at data ...
What's the Latest Development? Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used forests as their inspiration for a densely-packed collection of nanoscale "trees" that can convert solar energy into oxygen and hydrogen for use in fuel cells. When they absorb ...
What's the Latest Development? A century-old government war on wildfires in the western US has resulted in the growth of several billion excess trees that are negatively impacting ecosystems in several ways, according to Jamie Workman of the Environmental Defense Fund. For example, he says that ...