Walk through a modern art gallery, and you’ll likely hear comparisons of the masterpieces on the wall to children’s finger-painting. But a new study proves that people really can tell the difference between the masters and toddlers.
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The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the world’s largest educational research organization, recently adopted some ‘important changes’ to improve the quality of its annual conference. As AERA notes, the purpose of […]
Humans value love and friendship that aren’t just forged by family ties or sexual attraction. Now researchers have determined that such friendships exist among some animals.
After reading a story earlier this week about the problems in Bank of America’s mortgage modification department, I wondered—has the mortgage crisis become so large and pervasive that we have […]
Last week was another phenomenal week of guest blogging here at Dangerously Irrelevant. I had invited guests to reflect on how to reconcile standards- and data-driven accountability with so-called ‘21st […]
Researchers at Kyoto University claim they will be able to clone a baby mammoth from the DNA of a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth. The time frame: 5 to 6 years.
There’s no reason why education environments in the developing world shouldn’t be as elegant and functional as those in the developed. At least that’s the premise at the heart of […]
Forget slashing tires. You can trick a cheating ex into thinking he has an STD…or worse. Lucy Knight on the strange, and often murky, market for cybervengeance.
In an ideal world, celebrities would have a responsibility to come out, but the gay basketball star realizes that the process is personal and variable—like a gestation period. Some people […]
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“What makes cobras kings is not just their size, or their deadliness…it is that they eat other snakes. How does the king cobra maintain such an apparently high-risk lifestyle?”
“Experiments on monkeys suggest that the animals can recognise and react to their own image in a mirror. They altered their posture to look at their own genitals.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. But what happens when desperate times strike cultural institutions such as museums? The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (aka, Cimam) […]
Like Satan, he is known by many names—Sinterklaas, Père Noël, Tomte—but we Americans call him Santa Claus. The long white beard, red outfit, reindeer, etc., all seem like givens to […]
Tilt your map 90 degrees to the right, and the elephant reveals itself
In the midst of the circus surrounding Pastor Terry Jones’ plan to burn Qurans on the anniversary of September 11th, perhaps the most disturbing aspect is the emerging meme among […]
We are currently in the midst of earth’s “sixth great extinction.” For the past 10,000 years, existing species have been dying out faster than new species have been evolving, say […]
A few weeks ago, rumors started swirling that the United Nations was going to nominate Mazlan Othman, a celebrated Malayasian astrophysicist, to be the UN’s first Space Ambassador.
All Elephant and No Castle: a secret bestiary of the London Underground
Now that August, Big Think’s month of thinking dangerously, is over, we’d like you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to 10 of the radical ideas we presented.
The theory behind the substance graphene was first explored by theoretical physicist Philip Wallace in 1947 as kind of a starting point when he was doing research trying to understand […]
“New Evangelical” Joel Hunter (blue shirt) works with church members on a recycling campaign.Evangelical leader Joel C. Hunter, a registered Republican, will give the closing prayer at the Democratic National […]
A strange return to the age of the dinosaurs
Confidence is a trait typically cast as a higher-order function in the brain. It’s at once the act of making a decision, recognizing the decision as thought, and measuring the […]
A weird marriage of urban planning and personality cult
The weird sport of hunting for animals in maps
Eilert Sundt must have had a busy, happy week. As the president of the Norwegian Cartozoological Society, Mr Sundt probably is the world’s most prominent ambassador of the obscure discipline […]
The blithe feathers of our nation’s patrimony are now literally weighed down by oil, but our government and press already exude the sticky toxins of petroleum. In a sense, petroleum […]
The only way to visit this island is to read the book
It might have snuffed out Secession with minimal loss of life; but Lincoln chose both the blockade and an invasion