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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? Xerox has announced that, starting with the 2013-2014 school year, it will make its Ignite software available to interested schools that seek to turn their copiers into grading machines. What makes Ignite unique is that it's not a new version of a bubble test ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of materials chemists at MIT have found an effective and relatively affordable way to use electrolysis to extract iron from ore, which could lead to cleaner and cheaper methods of steelmaking. The process itself -- which involves passing current through a ...
What's the Latest Development? At the most recent TVNext Hack event, where developers competed for prizes in several different television tech categories, the winning "Best of Show" entry went to Twivo, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that blocks Twitter messages containing user ...
What's the Latest Development? Families in rural Indian communities are currently helping to test a device that could provide them with an affordable and reliable source of safe drinking water. Developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the filtration system combines ...
What's the Latest Development? Students at London's Royal College of Art have created two devices, a mask and goggles, that when worn enable users to isolate and amplify sounds and sights respectively. The Eidos mask captures sound through a directional microphone and runs it through software ...
What's the Latest Development? Launched today (May 8) by an international team of scientists, the SpaceWarps Web site invites the public to take a look at legacy images produced by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in hopes of identifying gravitational lenses, also known as space warps ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper published last week in Physical Review Letters suggests that cosmic rays could be the source of lightning generated during thunderstorms on Earth. Physicists Alex Gurevich and Anatoly Karashtin analyzed radio pulses from almost 3,800 lightning strikes in ...
What's the Latest Development? Speaking at the Humans 2 Mars Summit this week in Washington, NASA director Charles Bolden said that humans "now stand on the precipice of a second opportunity to press forward to what I think is man's destiny — to step onto another planet." However, to meet ...
What's the Latest Development? In a paper published in the latest issue of Science, MIT planetary scientist and astrophysicist Sara Seager suggests that the search for habitable worlds -- currently focusing around Earth-like exoplanets orbiting in an area commonly called "the Goldilocks zone ...
What's the Latest Development? Two weeks after launching a Kickstarter campaign, Antony Evans and a small group of biotech hobbyists and entrepreneurs have raised over $250,000 to fund their efforts to create plants that glow in the dark. They plan to do this by employing synthetic biology ...
What's the Latest Development? UNICEF's Sweden branch recently launched a new ad campaign that gets right to the point: Likes (on their Facebook page) are great, but they don't save lives. One poster caption says, "We have nothing against likes, but vaccine costs money." In a video ad, a young ...
What's the Latest Development? A Kickstarter campaign launched last week by the team at the public radio show "Planet Money" to raise funds for a special series met and blew past its goal of $50,000 in a single day. With six days left, the fund currently stands at over $300,000, proving to the ...
What's the Latest Development? According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the amount of data created in 2012 reached a whopping 2.8 zettabytes -- that's 2.8 trillion gigabytes -- and that number is predicted to double by 2015. Most of it is made by individuals as they go through their ...
What's the Latest Development? This month, Hieroglyph, a collaboration between science fiction author Neal Stephenson and the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, launched a Web platform that invites participants to work together on the kinds of future visions last ...
What's the Latest Development? A smartphone user walking around the San Diego campus of mobile chip manufacturer Qualcomm might find themselves enjoying a stronger signal and faster downloads, thanks to the distribution of prototypical cellular base stations that do the work of a cell phone ...