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Americans may talk a good game about “work-life balance,” but according to this study, they’re biased against working mothers. More surprisingly, those who liked working moms less also liked the […]

How designers are revolutionizing product packaging, one of consumerism’s most toxic and wasteful byproducts, by using smart engineering and innovative materials to dramatically lighten its carbon footprint.

The second part of Eruptions readers’ recollections of the historic May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are “harder,” more fundamentally “sciencey” sciences than hers. […]

The argument that “we take the internet for granted” may seem like a tired straw man. But perhaps the ideology of the internet could stand a second look. Maybe we […]

At last, a new Ian McEwan novel: Solar. The author’s website recites a list of reviews; there are so many. Tucked among them is a nod to a blog post […]

Caitlin Flanagan’s essay, Love Actually, in the new Atlantic, reminds us why mothers and daughters find adolescence uniquely challenging. A girl becomes a woman, and yet her relationship to that […]

This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]

Imagine no waiting room at the doctor’s office. Scratch that. Now picture no doctor’s office at all. In this practice, you make appointments via text, video chat or email, and […]

Researchers at the recent European Breast Cancer Conference said that up to one-third of cases could be prevented by a healthier diet and exercise regime.

A conversation with the head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Physics at Rockefeller University

This morning Big Think is pleased to present a kind of double feature: a full-length interview with CUNY theoretical physicist, futurist, and radio host Michio Kaku, and the launch of his […]

This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that Americans are using the Internet to alter the nature […]

Robert Kirshner of Harvard is one of the world’s most distinguished astrophysicists. So to kick off his Big Think interview, we asked the hardest-hitting astrophysics question in our arsenal: what’s […]

Fact: No thing nor event in the known universe or laws of physics lacks a cause. Assume: There is no Prime Cause (Creator / Singularity). Ergo: There is no universe. Fact: There is a universe. Therefore: the statement that was assumed is proven to be a false statement by reduction ad absurdum (proof by disproof). (Since “There is no Creator” is proven false, the opposite is true: There is a Creator.)

Part 2 of the Q&A with Dr. Boris Behncke of Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Catania.

This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]

After being plagued with technical problems, the partical collider meant to discover the origins of the universe will not run at full power for at least another three years.

For generations, the topic of invisibility has been of great interest. Although it was once dismissed as science fiction, it has now become reality on a small scale. Physics textbooks around the […]

Imagine it’s 1178 BC and you’re in the middle of writing one of the most essential works in the western canon, when all of the sudden an intense eclipse takes […]

Molecules cooled to less than a millionth degree Kelvin above absolute zero can still react chemically with one another despite the temperature causing near-negligible collision motion.

Jason Epstein thought of Amazon before Jeff Bezos. Or at least, he understood the concept: the necessity, and power, of making the world’s backlist available at all times. Epstein’s uniquely […]

String theory has been one of the most famous ideas to emerge from physics in the past 50 years, yet a vocal minority of physicists have criticized its failure to […]

A recent study on college students’ preferences for dating vs. hookups is, unaccountably, generating national media attention. The authors found that a bunch of 19-year-old college freshmen in the South […]

As a genre, science fiction could potentially wield more influence over its followers than any other cultural force. Through film, television, and comics, it has inspired countless socially-awkward young people […]

Despite it being US military practise to have a psychologist present during torture to “protect the victim”, experts argue there is “no role for mental health professionals” in such situations.

13 billion years later, experimenters at UC Berkeley have recreated conditions one millionth of a second after the Big Bang when bizarre plasma filled the universe.

Why use boring old bread to make your sandwich, when instead you can plop your bacon, cheese and sauce between two slices of deep-fried meat? It sounds like a sitcom […]

An Iranian nuclear scientist has been killed by bomb in a booby-trapped motorbike which exploded outside his home in a suburb of Tehran.

When one studies the philosophical foundations of physics for a living, even the most trivial of everyday objects poses profound questions. For the Columbia University professor David Albert, who spent […]