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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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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 ...
At Khan Academy, we talk about turning it into a global, one-world classroom. And in our mind what that is, is you have our videos that cover pretty much anything that someone wants to learn about. You have the exercises, you get feedback, and you get analytics and reports and data on how you’re ...
When severe weather conditions developed over Oklahoma on May 20, NOAA's GOES-13 satellite was switched to capture an image every 5 minutes as opposed to the normal interval of 30 minutes. The result is this amazing NOAAVisualizations high speed animation. "The added frequency greatly assists ...
How does modern technology intersect with ancient spirituality? This is the question that is posed in the work of Grimanesa Amorós, a Peruvian interdisciplinary artist, whose light sculpture installations will be featured tomorrow at BAZAAR ART NIGHT, which is a celebration of the first edition of ...
What's the Latest Development? A century-old government war on wildfires in the western US has resulted in the growth of several billion excess trees that are negatively impacting ecosystems in several ways, according to Jamie Workman of the Environmental Defense Fund. For example, he says that ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers from the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined current water supplies -- fresh and salty groundwater sources as well as seawater -- to determine how much could be reasonably used by farms dedicated to growing algae for ...
If you're a leader in a non-arts field you may believe that the arts are irrelevant to your business. The reality is that maybe you're right. Maybe in your core business it doesn't matter. But your customers care. You like your customers too, so what happens is that the arts are a way to ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US) details the challenges involved in what its authors call "climigration": the resettlement of communities that are losing their land due to the effects of ...
I’m willing to agree that information is a source of stress. I’m willing to agree that there's too much if it means that we have trouble finding what we’re looking for. But, yes, I think that is endemic to the human condition because we humans are information-seeking creatures. Information is ...
Those of you who have grown up on the Internet, when we look at you we see skills, competencies that we admire. We may want to learn them, but while you can try to teach them to us we will never be as competent as you are by the very nature of you're having grown up in this world, growing up with ...
The universe is quantum. Physicists have known that for decades. Yet the economy remains as Newtonian today as when Sir Isaac Newton was the Master of the Royal Mint at the beginning of the 18th century. The time has come for a new and improved quantum economics: An economic system that is ...
What explains the seemingly universal human fear of dying? It’s a mixture of two things, which could be separated. One is we know that other people die. And when other people die, particularly people who have a close role in our lives, we experience it as a potentially final loss. And from that ...