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.
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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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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 ...
A luxury apartment building is now under construction in Taiwan, and its design was inspired by the double helix of the DNA molecule. The building, named Agora Garden, will twist at a 90 degree angle, and not just because that's a cool thing to do. The design creates more surface area, and enables ...
There are some religion-bashers out there who make it sound as though religion is the source of all violence and conflict in the world. Richard Dawkins has come close to saying something like that, so did Christopher Hitchens. And it’s just empirically false. The greatest bloodshed in the ...
The word code turns out to be a really important word for my book, The Information . The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code. Code, of course, is a word with a long history, and it pops up again during ...
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 ...
Anxiety is the most prevalent emotion in most organizations in the United States today. Anxiety has two component parts. It’s what you don't know and what you can't control. So anxiety equals uncertainty times powerlessness. So the way you could work this equation is the following ...
As humans we evolved on this planet over the last hundreds of thousands of years in an environment that I would call local and linear. It was a local and linear environment because the only things that affected you as you were growing up on the plains of Africa was what was in a day’s walk. It ...
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 ...
When Bode Miller was the fastest skier in the world, he seemed to be racing with reckless abandon. His all-or-nothing approach earned him Olympic and World Cup medals, as well as plenty of DNFs (Did Not Finish). And yet, there was method to this madness. The self-taught Miller employed a creative ...
After Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter to Congressional leaders today admitting for the first time that the U.S. has killed four Americans with drone strikes. In response, Amnesty International's Zeke Johnson told The New York Times : "The Obama administration continues to claim ...
We are moving from a multi-decade focus on killing ALL bacteria via soaps, detergents, antibiotics and hand sanitizer, to a new understanding of the complex bacterial system in our bodies and in the world around us. We now understand that humans are 90% microbial but only 10% human. The average ...
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 ...