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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Big ideas in the news from around the web
“The Department of Homeland Security last February awarded a contract to a Massachusetts technology firm to determine malintent. The project, named FAST (or Fast Attribute Screening Technologies), uses noninvasive advanced technologies to determine the facial temperature, eye movement, respiration ...
“Iranian forces crossed into Iraq and seized an oil well just over the two countries' disputed border, Iraq's government said, prompting a protest from Baghdad and providing a dramatic display of the sometimes tenuous relations between the wary allies. The incident could trouble Iraq's drive to ...
“Scientists at UC Santa Barbara, in collaboration with scientists at University of Michigan, have developed synthetic particles that closely mimic the characteristics and key functions of natural red blood cells, including softness, flexibility, and the ability to carry oxygen. The primary function ...
“A new study may help drinkers pick their poison. In a head-to-head comparison, bourbon gave drinkers a more severe hangover than vodka, report Damaris Rohsenow of Brown University and colleagues in an upcoming issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. But vodka drinkers aren’t off ...
“If you were following Cosmic Variance yesterday, you saw its live blogging of one of the most anticipated recent announcements in physics: the team from Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) telling the world whether a Minnesota detector spotted evidence of dark matter. The answer? Maybe. CDMS ...
“A number of inmates from the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba are set to be transferred to a jail in the US state of Illinois. Barack Obama, the US president, ordered the acquisition of the currently near-empty high security facility in the rural town of Thomson on Tuesday. The prison is ...
“A French court ruled on Friday that Google infringed copyrights by digitizing books and putting extracts online without authorization, dealing a setback to its embattled book project. The court in Paris ruled against Google after a publishing group, La Martinière, backed by publishers and authors ...
“Seven U.S. banks were seized by regulators, bringing this year’s total of failed lenders to 140 as financial companies are tested by the recession and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. anticipates more shutdowns. Banks with $14.4 billion in total assets were closed yesterday in six U.S. states ...
Researchers claim a woman’s attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder but is instead to do with the “golden ratio” or distance between key facial factors such as nose and mouth. “In four separate experiments, the researchers asked university students to make paired comparisons of ...
A fragment of a temple to Isis submerged for centuries but recently hoisted from the Mediterranean sea is believed to date back to the era of Egyptian queen Cleopatra. “Archaeologists on Thursday hoisted a 9-ton temple pylon from the waters of the Mediterranean that was part of the palace complex of ...
“Ten months after the Obama administration began pressing lenders to do more to prevent foreclosures, many struggling homeowners are holding up their end of the bargain but still find themselves rejected, and some are even having their homes sold out from under them without notice. These borrowers ...
“The popular microblogging Web site Twitter was hacked overnight, leaving the millions who use the site tweetless. Those who tried to access Twitter were redirected to a site that had a green flag and proclaimed ‘This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army.’ The Web site was down for nearly an ...
“An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos. The particles showed as two tiny pulses of ...
Scientists have discovered, and caught on film, the deepest undersea erupting volcano at nearly 4,000 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean surrounding Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. “Scientists funded by NOAA and the National Science Foundation recorded the deepest erupting volcano yet discovered ...
Investigators have concluded that Twitter had no role to play in the drowning of a 2-year-old whose mother’s postings prior to his death have been criticised for having “a contributory effect”. “Shellie Ross, 37, has come under fire in the Internet community of Twitter and blogs, with some people ...