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
NYU Bio-ethicist Matthew Liao has caused a stir recently with a forthcoming paper that explores the biomedical modification of humans in order to stop us from consuming red meat. Liao is no stranger to controversy. He is known to Big Think readers for his dangerous idea that people should be ...
What's the Big Idea? Over the last two weeks, pink slime has become the safe food movement's equivalent of the Kony 2012 campaign. Over 200,000 people have signed an online petition to ban the use of what the food industry calls "lean beef trimmings" in school lunches. Larger questions have been ...
Scientists have discovered four new species of chameleon in Northern Madagascar, including the Brookesia micra, which now has the distinction of being the world's tiniest known lizard. Speedy runners, these chameleons are nearly impossible to catch during the day, so scientists waited until night ...
We all know the standard script surrounding divorce. A young person learns his/her parents are divorcing and their fantasy of a happy family is shattered. Falling into despair they under-perform in school, victims of selfish parents who put their own needs above that of their children. At the risk ...
In the annals of heroic human defenses against sharks, Polish kite surfer Jan Lisewski might just take the cake. Lisewski is the first person to kite surf across the Baltic Sea, a feat he recorded last year. However, a recent attempt to cross the Red Sea didn't go so well. After Lisewski had ...
Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus macaques has added two more shared traits: the enjoyment of pornography and the worship of celebrities. Here’s ...
In a previous post, we asked Dr. Michio Kaku which threats pose the greatest danger to humanity in 2012. Dr. Kaku listed, along with global warming and the laser enrichment of uranium, the possibility "that a government in the future may decide to weaponize a virus one day." And yet, the threat ...
Imagine if Rip Van Winkle fell asleep in 1992 and woke up yesterday. He would probably be amazed at the extent to which our national conversation on reproductive health has regressed in 20 years. Abortion is no longer at the center of the debate. It's contraception! While many health care plans ...
When Fortune magazine's assistant managing editor Leigh Gallagher turned 38 she made the decision to freeze her eggs, an experience she recently wrote about on the women's website The Hairpin. In her recent Big Think interview, Gallagher discusses her decision as well as the bioethics and ...
Here's a short pop quiz on human biology. True or False: A female is born with a finite number of egg cells that are released during her reproductive years. Her body does not make any more cells after she is born. If you took that quiz any time during the last 60 years and answered "true ...
What's the Big Idea? Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. According to Bill Nye, aka the science guy, if grownups want to "deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don ...
Ziggy Marley tells Big Think that smoking marijuana is "a very spiritual, sacramental, private thing." And yet, hemp, he says, is a greater issue for society to contend with. The industrial production of hemp, which is illegal in the U.S., Marley says can save the planet. Watch the video here:
What's the Big Idea? The legal status of medical marijuana in the United States is very hazy these days. 16 states plus the District of Columbia allow the use of medical marijuana, but there is a great discrepancy as to who is allowed to smoke it and how much they are allowed to possess. 17 ...
Using human stem cells to tackle human health issues remains controversial in the United States, but a team of Dutch researchers has found a potentially crowd-pleasing application of stem cell technology: growing a hamburger in a Petri dish. The full burger isn't ready for the grill just yet, but ...
There's been an alarming spike in lethal shark attacks on sea otters by sharks off California's Central Coast, and no one seems to know why. While attacks by sharks -- mostly Great Whites -- accounted for approximately 10 percent of sea otter deaths in the 1990s, today that number is 30 percent ...