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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
All London taxi drivers spend two to four years studying the shortest route between all roads within a six mile radius of Charing Cross before taking a test and receiving their license. But in a unique way, drivers are also taught conflict management, in particular the benefit of humility. "Drivers ...
"Western-style Holocaust denial—that is, the endeavor to produce pseudo-scientific proofs that the Jewish genocide did not happen at all or was only a massacre of far lesser scope than that commonly acknowledged—is actually very marginal in the Arab world," writes Gilbert Achcar. Rather, many Arabs ...
Scientists now think they know why seismic waves traveling between the Earth's poles move faster than those traveling east-west. It has to do with the way that the iron alloys at the planet's core have crystallized. While in in the past we thought of the earth's core as fairly homogeneous, it's now ...
"When you look at how much real-world evidence there is against the views of war-on-terror hawks, it’s not surprising that they would construct their own little universe, a place where 'jihadi intent' is an uncaused cause, and our only hope is to kill or intimidate the people who, through some ...
Having helped break the news business, Google now wants to fix it—"for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to." James Fallows looks at how some of the ...
"The European Union was to have become a kind of eternal utopia," writes Christoph Schwennicke. But over the past ten years, the idea of Europe has been going decidedly downhill. "Instead of creating a joint military, Europe must now be worried about keeping its common currency. Europe could end ...
William Saletan argues that we shouldn't ask Elena Kagan is she's gay, and she needn't volunteer an answer. "The political threat is that unconventional sexuality or religion can destroy the nominee," he writes. "But the moral threat is far greater. In the act of forced disclosure, 'one's ability to ...
David B. Hart wonders if the “New Atheism” movement "is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison ...
"The tea party movement’s issues are somewhat more complex than 30-second TV news clips suggest," writes Walter Rodgers, who suggests the vocalized concerns of tea partiers about big government mask a fear among aging, white Americans of their own diminishing political power. "Today’s tea party may ...
Sam Harris talks about the response to his argument at TED that "morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science." He discovered in the responses that "many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural ...
A Japanese mathematician has come up with what has been called the best illusion of the year by vision scientists. Kokichi Sugihara created a structure of complicated cardboard ramps that that seemed to make balls placed on the structure defy gravity. "From every viewpoint but one the contraption ...
In the wake of the housing bubble's burst, squatters are making their move on abandoned properties. Some are not just squatting for financial expediency—they are anarchists who believe everyone has a right to housing and reject the idea that homes be treated as commodities to be speculated over for ...
Beginning Friday, shoppers at more than 6,000 drugstores will be able to pick up a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments. The test also claims that it can give a sense of whether the user has a propensity for obesity or ...
Researchers have discovered that paternal mice that physically interact with their babies grow new brain cells and form lasting memories of their babies. Scientists determined that when paternal mice interact with their newborn babies, new brain cells develop in the olfactory bulb—the part of the ...
Last Thursday, May 6th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1000 points in a matter of minutes. The House Financial Services Committee will be holding a hearing today to try to figure out what happened, but there are still many major unknowns, including, ominously, what caused it, who was to blame ...