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.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
What's the Latest Development? Recently published online in Environmental Pollution is a study by the US Forest Service and the Davey Institute that describes the health impacts of trees in 10 major cities. By measuring concentrations of fine particulate pollution -- known as PM2.5, in which ...
What's the Latest Development? On July 19, Earth's residents will get to see what their home looks like from Saturn: specifically, from the perspective of NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which will take pictures of the neighborhood where it's been living for the last nine years. Cassini's camera will ...
What's the Latest Development? On Tuesday (June 18), NASA announced the start of the Asteroid Grand Challenge, an initiative that will culminate in the tracking and monitoring of any and every asteroid large enough to do damage to the Earth. That includes not only the really big ones -- 95 ...
There is a tendency for people to think science knows more than it knows. We hear phrases like "gaps in our knowledge" all the time, when in fact what we mainly have is knowledge in our gaps. The vastness of our scientific ignorance is especially evident when it comes to explaining how life ...
The best way to address climate change is to stop pumping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That would eventually halt the progress of climate change and eventually the planet’s biosphere would suck that CO2 out. We have targets for that but right now we’re not doing so ...
The whole history of physics has been a history of diminishing the nature of time and diminishing the role of time. Take a very simple example. When you see something move through the air – that’s something that happens in time. And then you could take a film that you made of that and call that ...
No, Shaun White was not snowboarding on Mars. These tracks, captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are thought to have been created from sliding dry ice on the Red Planet's Russell Crater. Click here for a zoomable image. In the video below, Serina Diniega, a planetary scientist at ...
This post originally appeared on the Newton blog on RealClearScience. You can read the original here. The building 29 cleanroom at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland is a tinkerer's dream. There, in an assortment of expensive pieces, rests NASA's preeminent project of ...
What's the Latest Development? The scientists and entrepreneurs behind the Lone Signal project are inviting the public to send them text and photo messages that will be beamed into space -- specifically, to the Gliese 526 star system, about 18 light-years away -- beginning June 17. To achieve ...
What's the Latest Development? A study published this week in Aeolian Research reveals that since 1994, the amount of dust that's been generated and blown across some parts of the western US has "gone up a few hundred percent," says University of Colorado-Boulder professor and study co-author ...
What's the Latest Development? Vanderbilt University professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho have developed a hypothesis on the composition of dark matter that, unlike other attempts at explanation, can be readily tested using existing underground detectors. Their focus is ...
What's the Latest Development? A new report out from the International Energy Agency (IEA) offers an aggressive plan for nations to follow over the next seven years in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The suggestions include imposing tighter energy-efficiency standards on a wide range of ...
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory released a video that captured multiple 'sun tornadoes,' or plasma moving across the sun’s surface. This type of violent space weather has the potential to create major problems for human activities, for instance, by damaging communication satellites. Watch ...
By "time is real" I mean to say that everything we experience and know about is caught in time, is caught in a moment, is not an illusion. It’s the deepest clue we have, perhaps, to the nature of reality. This is to counterpose the picture which was developed in physics from Galileo and Newton ...
The people who build their own theories of the universe tend to work alone and that is both a wonderful thing because it means they have the courage to create their own theory of reality basically with very little help and I do think it takes some real courage to do this, to be, as it were, a ...