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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The new rules for living longer and healthier
Many people think about Darwin strictly in terms of, if you will, gladiatorial combat. Person A is in conflict with person B because they both desire some object in their environment or whatever it might be. But when you read the later Darwin, The Descent of Man, it’s very clear. He ...
Flipperbot, the robot in the video below, was designed to test how sea turtles and other real-life organisms move outside the water. Flipperbot walks and crawls on complex surfaces to give researchers a better understanding of how a baby sea turtle can navigate tracks of beach sand. As it turns out ...
For humans and monkeys mere information can be pleasurable, even if that information is not useful in any way, or doesn’t have any adaptive value in and of itself. So for example, you could set up an experiment where a monkey has a light flash and then the monkey can have a choice of either ...
The story of the dark side of antioxidant research isn't well known outside of medical circles. It's an unseemly story, profoundly unsettling; a story that refuses to be made pretty or happy or uplifting no matter how hard you try to duct-tape a silver lining around it. It doesn't fit the ...
In a post following the Boston Marathon bombing, Big Think blogger Derek Beres suggested we need to redefine the term "terrorism." Beres noted that the animal rights activist groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front were responsible for the most "terrorist" acts over the last ...
What's the Latest Development? Parasites latch onto their hosts in many different ways, and one of them, Pomphorhynchus laevis, has inspired scientists to create a microneedle device that, when used for delicate skin grafts in particular, is both safer and considerably stronger than surgical ...
What's the Latest Development? Currently available on the online journal ArXiv is a paper in which its authors describe their application of Moore's Law -- which states that computers increase exponentially in complexity over a set period of time -- to the evolution of life on Earth. With this ...
Humans have a complex relationship to pleasure. We want to feel pleasure, so we eat food, drink water and have sex and thereby survive and get out genes into the next generation. But also, we clever humans have figured out how to artificially activate our pleasure circuits. So rather than ...
Over the last few years I have surveyed people and their attitudes toward war. I ask people this question: "Do you think there will ever come a day when we stop fighting wars once and for all?” Over 90 percent of the people that I've surveyed say, “No, war is a permanent part of the human condition ...
Given that there is a lack of consensus about how to raise ordinary children, it is not surprising that we don't know much about raising special children. So parenting in many ways is a crap shoot. Andrew Solomon makes this observation in his book Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the ...
The advances in genetics have been absolutely amazing over the last few decades since the discovery that DNA was the hereditary material. For example, we’ve sequenced the genomes of many, many different organisms, including at this point, hundreds of plant genomes. And so we now can read the ...
In Brian Sykes's 2004 book Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men, he described how male fertility could be decline to the point where men will no longer be able to reproduce naturally. In our recent interview with Dr. Sykes, we asked him what kinds of interventions he would endorse to save the Y ...
When you are trying to decide on what kind of doctor that you need for a particular problem first you have to think what kind of problem you have. So if you're looking for a primary care doctor who is going to take care of you in general you want to look for a doctor that is well educated. So you ...
It is hard to imagine a topic in science that Mary Roach won't touch. After all, as Carl Zimmer put it, the acclaimed science writer "put her head in a cow's stomach for you, dear reader. If you don't read [Roach's new book] Gulp, then that was all for naught. Plus, you'll miss out on the funniest ...
Consider this scenario. Due to protectionist trade policies, you pay 41 percent more for sugar than the rest of the world, and yet you tend to consume it not as the kind of natural sugar that is found in breast milk, but in the form of processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup. You make a ...