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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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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 ...
Thanks to the Slooh Space Camera, you can catch views of the 'Ring of Fire' solar eclipse starting today at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT). This spectacular event occurs every year when the Moon nears the farthest point from the Earth making it appear too small to cover the Sun, creating a ring of ...
What's the Latest Development? Launched today (May 8) by an international team of scientists, the SpaceWarps Web site invites the public to take a look at legacy images produced by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in hopes of identifying gravitational lenses, also known as space warps ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper published last week in Physical Review Letters suggests that cosmic rays could be the source of lightning generated during thunderstorms on Earth. Physicists Alex Gurevich and Anatoly Karashtin analyzed radio pulses from almost 3,800 lightning strikes in ...
What's the Latest Development? In a paper published in the latest issue of Science, MIT planetary scientist and astrophysicist Sara Seager suggests that the search for habitable worlds -- currently focusing around Earth-like exoplanets orbiting in an area commonly called "the Goldilocks zone ...
Ten thousand photo frames across 33 photo landscapes are compressed into this impressive time-lapse video of the Northern Lights. Watch here: North Country Dreamland from LakeSuperiorPhoto on Vimeo.
It is "human destiny" to go to Mars, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said today at the Humans 2 Mars Summit that is taking place this week at George Washington University in Washington, DC. You can watch the Summit streaming LIVE below. According to its website, H2M will be "a ...
This picture is not of an alien invasion. It is a thunderstorm cloud called a supercell that was photographed in Glasgow, Montana. It lasted but a few hours and caused minor damage. Read more about this phenomenon here. Image Credit & Copyright: Sean R. Heavey
"Why is the mass of the electron what it is and not 12 times larger or half the size?" Lee Smolin asks this and many other questions in today's lesson, which explores not only what the laws of nature are, but why are they what they are? Furthermore, if an experiment is conducted 10 years from ...