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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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There is plenty that we still don't know about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a method that has been used to greatly increase natural gas production in the U.S. and around the world. Here's what we do know. Fracking involves pumping a mixture of water, sand and chemicals deep into underground ...
There's something happening and you don't know what it is: PhD physicists from elite programs dabbling in the occult. These physicists, described in David Kaiser's new book How the Hippies Saved Physics , would seem to fit right in with the other zany characters who inhabit Bob Dylan's song, "Ballad ...
Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have found strong evidence for the Higgs Boson. The Higgs has been postulated for its power to explain the existence of matter in the universe. In other words, its discovery is at least a step towards explaining the biggest of big questions ...
Theoretical Physicist Dr. Michio Kaku says that even with strong evidence of the Higgs Boson, it is not time to pop the champagne. Next up: use the Large Hardon Collider to find dark energy. Watch the video here: Editor's note: We've been watching many of the reactions around the Web ...
"Can Scientists Just Find the God Particle Already?" That was Gawker's amusing headline last December when scientists at the nuclear research center CERN reported "tantalizing glimpses" of the Higgs subatomic particle. We have been holding our collective breath ever since, but come July 4th we ...
The recent berthing of SpaceX’s (NSG 100: SET; #1) Dragon capsule at the International Space Station (ISS) changed history by becoming the first commercial spacecraft to successfully berth with the ISS. NSG analysts have extensively written in Thruster that the event will catalyze the growth of the ...
The United States is an innovation economy while China is a copycat economy. That is how the conventional wisdom goes, and a common objection to China's way of doing business was neatly summarized by Alexandra Harney recently in The New York Times. "Too often China’s purpose is not to build on what ...
What is the Big Idea? The energy crisis is one of the greatest economic and social problems of our time. How can greenhouse gas emissions be reduced at a time when developing nations are increasing consumption? How can development of alternative fuels be encouraged to ease dependence on oil and ...
NASA released this video of the late Ray Bradbury reading a wonderful short poem entitled "If Only We Had Taller Been," which Bradbury wrote on the occasion of the historic Mariner 9 Mars Orbiter mission, on November 12, 1971. In the video, Bradbury confesses he is the "least scientific" member of ...
If you're a space junkie like me, there was quite a lot to take in this week. And it was all pretty exciting. First there was the splashdown of SpaceX's Dragon capsule after its first successful delivery run to the International Space Station, a landmark mission for the commercial space industry ...
A little science-fiction philosophy to provoke you to remember on Memorial Day, courtesy of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit: Suppose you were given the chance to teleport yourself, Star Trek style, directly to your holiday picnic or barbecue today, avoiding traffic and allaying fears about ...
With state and local governments still suffering from a persistent deficit of tax revenues due to the moribund economic recovery, smart politicians are looking ahead and lobbying for spaceport development in their constituencies. Spaceport America in Southern New Mexico has been the most ...
A Chinese flag, not an American one, will be planted in the lunar dust when the next manned mission to the moon occurs some time around 2025. Scientific teams in Europe, not the U.S., are poised to discover the Higgs boson. Indeed, the U.S. has lost the initiative not just in space, but also in ...
Get this: there is a startup called I Dream of Space that is selling posters for $10 that also come with the chance to win a trip to space. In other words, your $10 ticket could be worth a $200,000 seat on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 trip on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx. Apparently the ...
Elon Musk is going to Mars. With or without NASA. Of course, the ambitious former PayPal entrepreneur who founded SpaceX in 2002 has to take one step at a time. A very important first step, indeed a milestone, will happen this Saturday, May 19 at 4:55 a.m, when the SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to ...