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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This image shows the orbit of asteroid 1998 QE2 which will be making a flyby on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC). If the 1.7 mile space rock were to make impact, we would almost certainly be doomed. The good news is that the asteroid, which was discovered 15 years ago ...
CERN and TED-Ed have collaborated on a great animation that explains the basics of the Higgs boson. Dave Barney and Steven Goldfarb's lesson was animation by Jeanette Nørgaard for TED-Ed. Watch here: View full lesson here: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-basics-...
How is the Earth's surface changing over time? The image above depicts Alaska’s Columbia Glacier retreat from 1984 to 2011. This is just one of the many stunning phenomena that can be observed using the tools of a new Timelapse project. In conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA ...
What's the Latest Development? At Wednesday's IceCube Particle Astrophysics symposium in Madison, WI, a team of researchers announced the detection of 26 high-energy neutrinos, all of which landed on the cubic kilometer of South Pole ice monitored by the IceCube neutrino observatory between May ...
What's the Latest Development? Over 32 million people were displaced by floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters in 2012, according to data released this week by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDRC), a group established by the Norwegian Refugee Council to track forced ...
How can physicists tackle the problem of achieving faster-than-light travel? Marc Millis, the former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, explores this question in the video below from Space.com, and also provides an elegant answer to the question of why. Not only would ...
What's the Latest Development? At this week's Meeting of the Americas, held in Mexico by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), University of Milan researchers reported that Mount Everest is warmer than it used to be: The snow cloak covering the world's tallest mountain has shrunk by 13 percent ...
What's the Latest Development? As part of their Ventus project, a team of researchers at Arizona State University will reward the person who can provide the most usable information about a power plant's location, carbon dioxide emissions, and other operational features with a trophy, author ...
The Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield just ended his command of the International Space Station, but not before the media-savvy commander issued a fitting sign-off: the first music video from space. Hadfield, who previously got our attention, and that of many others, with this microgravity ...
It’s a great time to go into theoretical physics. We’ve just passed through a period which was not such a good time to be a theoretical physicist in which we had several decades in which theory got way ahead of experiment. And it took experiment a while to catch up. Now that we have the ...
This image depicts the annual "ring of fire" eclipse crossing Queensland's Cape York in northern Australia. See the high res image here. Image Credit & Copyright: Cameron McCarty, Matthew Bartow, Michael Johnson - MWV Observatory, Coca-Cola Space Science Center, Columbus State University ...
This post originally appeared on the Newton blog on RealClearScience. Read the original here. Venus has always captured the attention of humanity. Of all the objects that adorn our night sky, it's the brightest, excluding the Moon. Peering through his telescope in the early 17th century ...
False coloring is used in this image to reveal greater detail. The image here depicts mystery martian morphology. It captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image is courtesy of NASA/JPL/University of Arizona See ...
Anyone on planet Earth can submit a haiku to be sent to Mars on the MAVEN mission. Here are the guidelines. The poem must be three lines. It must have five syllables in the first line, followed by seven syllables, followed by five syllables. The submission deadline is July 1st. The public will ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of materials chemists at MIT have found an effective and relatively affordable way to use electrolysis to extract iron from ore, which could lead to cleaner and cheaper methods of steelmaking. The process itself -- which involves passing current through a ...