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.
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What's the Latest Development? Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang, graduate students working in the Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory at the University of California-Davis, have designed a textile that is not only water-repelling but self-draining. It's a combination of a hydrophobic fabric and water ...
What's the Latest Development? At last weekend's 2013 Bay Area Maker Faire, pediatrician and pain researcher Amy Baxter gave a lecture on Buzzy, a bee-shaped device she created that, when applied to a patient who's about to receive an injection, uses its built-in vibrating motor and ice pack to ...
What's the Latest Development? California-based UberMedia has launched UberAds, a platform that sends ads to customers' mobile devices based on their publicly-available social media data -- from sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest -- as well as their (optional) GPS location. Using this ...
What's the Latest Development? US military officials report that hypersonic weapons -- which would fly at more than five times the speed of sound -- could be available as soon as 2025, given current research and development progress. Earlier this month, the Air Force/DARPA experimental X-51A ...
What's the Latest Development? It's a long way from a "Star Trek"-style replicator, but the 3D printer engineer Anjun Contractor used to print a square of chocolate got the attention of NASA, and now he and his company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, have been given $125,000 to ...