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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Real birds are capable of impressive acrobatic flying maneuvers because they can precisely control their wing motions. It is very difficult to replicate that with a robot because bird-like maneuvers require an extremely lightweight platform. The robot raven in this video, however, is built out ...
What's the Latest Development? Software developer Federico Zannier recently launched a Kickstarter campaign titled "A bite of Me" in which he offers up his digital footprint -- including but not limited to "[e]mails, chat logs, location data, browser history, [and] screenshots" -- for sale ...
What's the Latest Development? At a recent SIGCHI conference in Paris, researchers presented their paper describing the effect of password meters on users' choices of passwords. Test subjects who were asked to evaluate the usability of a university computer system were instructed to change their ...
What's the Latest Development? Now that the US State Department has temporarily banned the release of schematics for 3D printed guns -- after they were downloaded over 100,000 times since their publication last week by the firearms manufacturer Defense Distributed -- writer Cory Doctorow wonders ...
What's the Latest Development? Deutsch Telekom, which provides Internet services for over 60 percent of German users, has announced that it will begin restricting data access for all its landline broadband customers starting in 2016. At bottom, once a user reaches the proposed download limit ...
Many people actually believe right now that we can print an entire living organ. There’s this notion that we can print a real eyeball right now. That’s decades off. The state-of-the-art right now is that researchers have successfully printed living cells into the exact figuration of a piece of ...
What's the Latest Development? Researchers from universities across the country, participating in a study for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), have found that two types of nanomaterials -- made from titanium dioxide and carbon respectively -- caused inflammation ...
What's the Latest Development? After being refused a request to see public data records collected from automated license plate readers in the Los Angeles area, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are now suing the city police department and the ...
What's the Latest Development? Xerox has announced that, starting with the 2013-2014 school year, it will make its Ignite software available to interested schools that seek to turn their copiers into grading machines. What makes Ignite unique is that it's not a new version of a bubble test ...
Of all of the applications for additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, food tends to be the most universally popular. In today's lesson, Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman, authors of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, show us how digital cuisine not only allows chefs to print interesting ...
What's the Latest Development? At the most recent TVNext Hack event, where developers competed for prizes in several different television tech categories, the winning "Best of Show" entry went to Twivo, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that blocks Twitter messages containing user ...
What's the Latest Development? Families in rural Indian communities are currently helping to test a device that could provide them with an affordable and reliable source of safe drinking water. Developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, the filtration system combines ...
Digital cuisine is something that everybody gets excited about. It doesn’t matter whether you go to a group of very buttoned up executives and you show them a 3-D printer printing food. They seem to end up clustered around it and everybody looks as they see a cookie slowly being printed out on the ...
Before the explosion of the auto industry, there was the local blacksmith. They were charged with forging custom horseshoes to protect the hooves of the best transportation available to man at that time. Fast-forward to the 21st century and we may see a modern version of the blacksmith in many ...
The Singularity - a potential future event that represents computers overtaking human intelligence - is one of the most talked about ideas on Big Think. However, here is a perspective that we don't often see. How will the Singularity impact economic productivity? You will get $40 trillion just ...