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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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
If you look at the history of science you can ask have there been people who were outsiders in the past who are now accepted today. That raises an issue about what it means to be an insider or an outsider. Until relatively recently - and it only dates back to the really the middle of the 19th ...
"Is this the future?" asked Bill Nye, aka, the science guy, on CNN this evening. Nye, of course, was referring to the tornado that devastated the area around Oklahoma City today, which is, of course, not an isolated extreme weather event. We have been witnessing storms of increasingly greater ...
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 ...