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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 application of 3-D printing in the classroom is very interesting. There are a lot of possibilities. Here are just two examples. One is at the university level, something that I’ve experienced firsthand. I teach product design at Cornell. And often, you know, we try to give students the ...
The first President Bush had promised the American people in his campaign to be elected that he would solve the acid rain problem. And so when he got in to office I was invited to the White House by his counsel C. Boyden Gray and we talked about many subjects. But one thing that the Environmental ...
My advice for people who are in high school and college or graduating college is the same. Find out what you love. What you love in your heart more than anything else and do that. You can make a career out of anything -- out of toys, video games, even space flight. So at the end of the day ...
Product design is one of these very amorphous kinds of processes that involve anything from coming up with new concepts, from being able to have great insights into who customers are and what they need. That involves a lot of technical skills and being able to predict things and calculate. It ...
We have not used the net to promote the kind of peer-to-peer economy that challenged feudalism in the 1100s and 1200s. People had been living for a thousand years as surfs under the lords and they finally developed local currencies and crafts and traveling merchants and they started to develop an ...
What's the Latest Development? Social scientists and health officials in Norway are noticing a worrisome trend: Over time, the number of people who respond to surveys has dropped significantly, to the point where one major national survey involving young people and their drug and alcohol use was ...
What's the Latest Development? Couch potatoes rejoice: Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a prototypical system, WiSee, that works with an existing wi-fi connection to allow a person in the kitchen, for example, to change the channel on their living room TV with just a ...
What's the Latest Development? Explosive dye packs are so 20th-Century: A new method for catching bank robbers involves rigging a vault with a device that fills it with smoke if an unauthorized person enters. What's special about this smoke is that it contains artificial DNA that invisibly coats ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota have designed a toy-sized quadcopter -- a four-bladed helicopter -- that gets its instructions from a person's brain. It works through the use of a special electrode-equipped cap that reads brain waves using EEG ...
What's the Latest Development? The city of Pasadena, CA has a new program, FoldnGo, in which anyone who lives, works, or attends school in the city can get $220 off the price of a foldable bike. In exchange, participants are encouraged to ride the bikes at least twice a week -- ideally as part ...
What the planet needs is profitable for individual businesses. This way of thinking has been tried and it has worked. It has worked for fish, where we’ve given fishermen an incentive to be stewards of the fishery. Suddenly they become advocates for lower catch limits. If they have a share in that ...
In about 15 years we'll be able to indefinitely extend life, says futurist Ray Kurzweil in a special appearance in the electro House musician Steve Aoki's new video "Singularity." The video below is yet another indication that Kurzweil's ideas have been accepted into mainstream culture, and ...
What's the Latest Development? At a panel discussion at last week's World Science Festival, scientists and legal experts met to discuss the implication of putting "brains on trial." According to Stanford neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans are now ...
What's the Latest Development? Among the critiques surrounding last month's release of Microsoft's latest Xbox iteration, the Xbox One, is this: In an age where, according to writer Tom Chatfield, "there are more smartphones in the world than consoles have been sold in history" and high-quality ...
What's the Latest Development? A group of French researchers has launched a project, Cormoran, that will investigate ways to create "cooperative ad hoc networks" using individuals' wireless sensors and transmitters as nodes. Each person would represent a relay point through which data could be ...