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
What's the Latest Development? Last year, as a challenge to get more children to play outdoors, the UK-based conservation charity National Trust released a list titled "The 50 Things To Do Before You're 11¾," which included tasks ranging from "throw some snow" to "light a fire without matches ...
Spring. It's one of the nature's greatest shows, and a prime time for observing natural science. This spring has been a chilly one, and scientists, farmers and all sorts of outdoors enthusiasts are wondering if nature is out of sync, especially in the midwestern United States. "Spring has gone ...
Abstract Expressionism is now over half a century old, and in all those years nobody has bothered to improve upon the antiquated techniques of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. If you want to express your emotions, the expectation is that you spill or spread colorful pigments onto a swathe of canvas ...
We have a very strange sort of schizo-relationship with bacteria in our culture. On the one hand, there’s a tremendous amount of phobia, a tremendous number of bottles of Purell purchased, and the vast, vast majority of these bacteria that people are worried about are harmless in the case of ...
The study of the human microbiome is a fast emerging field of scientific endeavor, driven by the idea that we need to rethink our relationship to the 100 trillion microbes that reside in the human body. While we have been blasting these bacteria with antibiotics for many years, closer investigation ...
There are two lines of DNA that are very important and will remain so -- the ones going down your maternal line and your paternal line, and they are very informative. But they only cover a very small part of your genome. We now know a little bit more about how to analyze the other parts of your ...
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 ...