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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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Population growth is a very real concern. When we were hunter-gatherers we were at five million people on the planet. Now there’s seven billion and we’re headed toward nine billion, maybe even ten billion by the middle of the century. And some environmentalists would say population growth is at ...
What's the Latest Development? Among many other culinary distinctions, Italy is known for its high-quality cured meats, which carry the unique signatures of the areas where they're created. However, many of them have been banned in the US for decades, often turning meat-loving tourists into ...
CERN and TED-Ed have collaborated on a great animation that explains the basics of the Higgs boson. Dave Barney and Steven Goldfarb's lesson was animation by Jeanette Nørgaard for TED-Ed. Watch here: View full lesson here: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-basics-...
If you look at the broad literature that has been done on religious and spiritual beliefs and practices and how they relate to human health the large majority of the studies point to a positive influence that when people are religious or spiritual they tend to have lower levels of stress, anxiety ...
"Look out Facebook!" tweeted Rupert Murdoch on the occasion of Facebook's one-year anniversary of its botched IPO. "Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously," he continued. "First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago." What do you think? Is so-called "Facebook ...
What's the Latest Development? This week iRobot, the maker of the military PackBot robot, announced that it had secured multimillion-dollar contracts with the organizers of next year's World Cup, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro and 12 nearby host cities in Brazil. Alongside thousands of ...
When you think of a prosthetic limb, the first thing that comes to mind is not beauty. After all, these are products that are made by engineers, not designers. Meet Scott Summit, who uses 3D printing and digital scanning to make beautiful products that change the lives of people with prosthetic ...
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 ...