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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In the world of Henry-Alex Rubin's new feature film, Disconnect , the hunters have a distinct advantage over the hunted and their protectors. The bullies and thugs have technology on their side, and they use it in all sorts of ways to stalk, trick, surprise and catch their prey. But don't ...
What's the Latest Development? Two veterans of the renewable energy scene, Mike Donnell and Tony VanMeeteren, are preparing to release their Solar Electric Scooter (SES) to people who offer at least $1,500 on the fundraising site When You Wish through May 22. The SES' riding platform is a ...
What's the Latest Development? IMRSV (formerly Immersive Labs) has moved from designing "smart" billboards that changed ads depending on the person watching them to creating software that can turn any video camera into an analytics tool. The software, called Cara, collects real-time anonymous ...
In our new report series "8 Exponential Trends that will Shape Humanity" we explore eight rapidly accelerating trends that will shape institutions, governments, businesses and everyday consumers. The third section of the report examines the future of healthcare. Sun Microsystems co founder and ...
If you’re an empathetic or a kind-hearted person, how do you protect yourself? I think one of the first things to recognize is the range of styles that people bring to their everyday interactions. So on one end of the spectrum we have the givers who do tend to enjoy helping others. On the other ...
Disruptive innovations often take a long time to come to fruition. So for those of you who were around in 1999, 2000 and 2001, the world was coming to an end. Everything was being disrupted and we weren’t going to buy our car, we were just going to buy the subscription to OnStar and everything ...
What's the Latest Development? According to a recent article in New Scientist, defense contractor Raytheon is working on developing a portable, reduced-range version of the crowd-dispersal military technology known as Active Denial. In its current form, it works by directing high-frequency ...
Folk physics is what everybody knows without taking any classes in physics. It’s towels absorb water. That if you throw a brick towards a plate of glass, it’s probably going to break the glass. You can’t push a rope. It’s what we learn about the everyday things in the world and how they react ...
What's the Latest Development? A paper appearing in the online version of Cell this week describes the successful reprogramming of human skin cells into embryonic stem cells. Scientists from the Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center figured out that ...
What's the Latest Development? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a synthetic material that, when used to coat a device such as a heart valve or breast implant, prevents the body from rejecting it. The hydrogel is comprised of water and a special polymer that deflects all ...
How is the Earth's surface changing over time? The image above depicts Alaska’s Columbia Glacier retreat from 1984 to 2011. This is just one of the many stunning phenomena that can be observed using the tools of a new Timelapse project. In conjunction with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA ...
If you’re in your 40s and you’ve been studying law and you’re fed up and you don’t enjoy it and it didn’t really connect to you, you’re not going to suddenly quit law and become a rock star. It’s not realistic. You don’t have the energy. You don’t have the good looks anymore. It’s not gonna ...
I hated the idea, the underlying premise of documentary filmmaking, hated it. Some people may quivel with it but you were given these documentary rules, how non-fiction should be shot. You should use available light; you shouldn’t bring a lot of lights into a scene. You should use the light that ...
Have you heard that money buys happiness? That's right, your parents lied to you again. In a recent global survey, researchers demonstrated that wealth is a key variable that can explain the disparity of happiness between countries. And we know that it's really true, because happiness research is ...
Last month President Obama launched the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative to enable scientists to create a dynamic picture of brain function. As Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, writes on BRAINfeedback.nih.gov ...