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 past September, the Mars Curiosity Rover found evidence of flowing water on the Red Planet, its most significant scientific discovery. Water is found in the form of ice on the planet's polar ice caps and water vapor is also present in the atmosphere. No bodies of water exist. But they used to ...
I've tried to write about the remarkable discoveries in science over the last 40 years because I think that's really what motivated me. I want to communicate these amazing revelations about the universe. And it is true that I argued that they suggest the universe could come from nothing without ...
Over the last month, big news shook NewSpace and advanced the narrative of the industry. The stories’ main characters are not NewSpace companies with climactic reveals of technological breakthroughs. Instead, the protagonists are investors who support their investments and embrace new ones. With ...
"I don't like Sputnik moments," says the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After all, if you experience a "Sputnik moment," it means you are playing catch-up. That's the situation the U.S. faced after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space in 1957. NASA was created in response ...
This article originally appeared in ReaClearScience's Newton Blog. You can read the original here. It's amusing and intellectually stimulating to seriously ponder the existence and characteristics of alien life. But like quantum mechanics, such contemplations can easily wrack the mind, leaving ...
The picture above is an illustration of what the Jefferson Memorial would look like 25 feet underwater. Nickolay Lamm of StorageFront.com applied data on sea level rise to contemporary images, and the results are truly worth a thousand words. The data was produced Remik Ziemlinski of Climate ...
The Transit of Venus. Partial eclipses of the sun by the moon. The largest flare of this solar cycle. Comet Lovejoy,. These are some of the highlights of the last three years in the life of our star. And thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), we have a nearly unbroken record of these ...
Everything is a bit more complicated in space. For instance, try wringing out a wet towel. That's what Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadfield does in a microgravity experiment in the video below. Watch as the water squeezes out of the cloth and runs along the surface of the cloth and onto ...
If you are wondering what dark matter is, here is a good explanation from Alex Kritchevsky on Quora: Dark matter...comes from the observation that galaxies should not be able to rotate at the speed they seem to rotate at based on their visible mass alone (and this is a huge effect ...
What's the Latest Development? Jadav "Molai" Payeng is a farmer living in northern India who, as a 16-year-old in 1979, began planting vegetation in a dried-out sandbar near his home after seeing many dead and dying reptiles there. More than 30 years of single-minded effort later, that sandbar ...
What's the Latest Development? Starting this summer, scientists and the public will be able to access real-time views and data on the Pacific Ocean thanks to an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation. The Regional Cabled Observatory consists of sensors and fiber-optic cables placed ...
What's the Latest Development? Electric bikes -- which can be pedaled with or without the help of an electric motor -- outsold electric cars by a wide margin in 2012, with worldwide sales estimates of 29 million and 120,000 respectively. The vast majority of e-bikes were bought by customers in ...
What's the Latest Development? Released today to coincide with Earth Day, a new Huffington Post/YouGov poll finds that far fewer Americans are concerned about the environment in 2013 than they were 43 years ago when Earth Day was first established. Thirty-nine percent of Americans surveyed ...
By Zane Friedkin (guest blogger) It is beginning to look like the 21st century may indeed turn out to be the “endgame of the human race,” as Arundhati Roy predicted in 2009. There is now near-universal consensus among scientists that the threat posed by global warming is severe and that if ...
Has the impact of human behavior on the Earth's atmosphere created a new geological epoch? If so, we must shift gears radically, and that is what today's "Eco Warriors" -- people like Richard Branson, Michael Bloomerg, Stella McCartney and others -- are doing, forging innovative partnerships ...