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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.
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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American politics and the big picture
In a move that goes completely against the conventional wisdom of online media—which Orion Jones discusses here—News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is considering preventing Google from indexing his news sites, effectively removing properties like the Wall Street Journal from Google's search results ...
The battle for control of the Republican Party continues. Earlier this week, 10 Republican National Committee members circulated a resolution aimed at making sure that every Republican supports "conservative principles and public policies" and opposes "Obama's socialist agenda." Any Republican who ...
Greg Sargent calls our attention today to an interview Bush's former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino gave last night on Fox News' "Hannity." In the interview, Perino takes the Obama administration to task for not calling the Fort Hood massacre a "terrorist attack." "I don't mean to be ...
As one of my professors used to joke, any field with the word "science" in its name is probably not a science. If you have to explain that what you're doing is science, it probably isn't. The so-called social sciences, in other words, may not in a certain sense be sciences at all. Because we are ...
The social networking site Twitter has taken off this year. According to Alexa it is now the 15th-most widely used site on the web. Its micro-blogging format—users post 140 character messages for their followers to read—makes Twitter perfect for the rapid dissemination of information. During the ...
For the first time, according to Gallup's latest tracking poll, less than fifty percent of Americans approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as President. That's down from 60% in July. As Greg Sargent says, this just confirms what Quinnipiac and Fox polls showed earlier in the week. And Obama's ...
In the 1960s, the world seemed on the verge of a global food crisis, as the population grew faster than the food supply. As I wrote last week, thanks largely to a suite of technologies known as "the Green Revolution"—which combined high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and corn with the intensive ...
The Obama administration is finally getting serious about closing Guantanamo. The main obstacle to closing the military prison has always been that it wasn't clear where to put the approximately 200 detainees still being held there. But now the administration has floated the possibility that it ...
In 1968, a highly-respected population biologist at Stanford named Paul Ehrlich published a best-selling book called "The Population Bomb," warning of global famine as the global population grew faster than the world's food supply. The growing population, he argued, would put such a strain on the ...
In what was a remarkable turnaround—and a huge victory for progressives—last week, the House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill that includes a provision for a government-run program, which would compete with private health insurance plans. The Democrats managed to include the ...
There's no question that we've come along way in the way we perceive race. So far, in fact, that we elected a black man to the highest office in the country last November—something that would have been unthinkable just thirty years earlier. Perhaps nothing captures the distance we've come better ...
Last week, I wrote about the dangers of waiting until the chemicals we are exposed to are conclusively proven to be dangerous before regulating them, especially when most studies on their effects are sponsored by the industries that use them. This is particularly important in light of a new study ...
Bisphenol A—generally known as BPA—is an organic compound used in the manufacture of plastics. It's also what's known as an endocrine disruptor. Because it's chemically similar to our own hormones, it can interfere with our bodies' development and metabolism, potentially with serious consequences ...
In a special election Tuesday, Democrat Bill Owens won a seat in upstate New York that the Republicans had controlled since 1872. And if the Republican party had been able to unite behind a single candidate they would likely still control it. While local officials had nominated a relative moderate ...
On Tuesday—on the anniversary of President Obama's election—Republicans won significant victories in a handful of off-year elections around the country. In particular, they won both open governor seats. In Virginia, Republican Bob McConnell beat Democrat Creigh Deeds by a whopping seventeen points ...