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At this time of year social interaction increases, including where many of us work.  With pressure to meet year-end goals, tension may be in the air and made worse by more meetings than anyone wants to attend.  This climate offers an opportunity to assess if what you say is actually being heard — to examine when and whether your comments are talked over, interrupted or even ignored.

Big Data is a big deal. Not only is it a major asset in today’s tech-driven economy, it also has the ability to tell stories about who we are as […]

Building and sustaining a strong office culture requires frequent assessments of the emotional climate. Keeping tabs on how your employees feel (and fixing things when they’re down) will boost productivity and decrease turnover.

The human capacity for reason may be fragile and partial but it is not belied by studies in which large percentages of subjects answer a few tricky questions incorrectly.

Before hashtags and newsfeeds and even pens, paper and the press, the spread of ideas traces back to the cultural art of storytelling. This deep-seated tradition of sharing knowledge and […]

Is there an ideal atmosphere for creativity and innovation? Research suggests that dim light, a little messiness, and a shot of liquid courage are all boons to the artistic spirit.

If there’s something before the Big Bang, then what does that mean for the beginning of our Universe? “You can try to lie to yourself. You can try to tell […]

Letting data and evidence, not fears or ideology, guide you is harder than you’d imagine. Image credit: European XFEL, via http://www.xfel.eu/research/benefits/. “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of […]

Celebes crested macaque is an endangered species of monkey, which is obviously a shame especially considering what talented photographers they are. In Indonesia, one grabbed David Slater’s camera and snapped […]

Nudges, “choice architecture,” social marketing and other non-rational approaches to government are a pretty significant development. After all, these policies replace explicit arguments (“you should get more exercise for these […]

Several scientists share their thoughts on why big athletes sometimes come up short in high-pressure situations. The basic gist: stress causes them to overanalyze.

Swedish scientists have found that learning a new language has a significant effect on the brain and improves language skills as a whole.

Don’t panic if you’ve lost your phone. Most devices have built-in retrieval features. Other strategies and approaches can help you get yours back in a flash.

A civil debate about genetically modified food offers hope about our capacity to make judgments about risk based on facts, not just on our feelings.

You have to identify the causes of your procrastination in order to beat it. More often than not, ego and a fear of failure are at the root of the problem.

After previously discussing surveillance and autonomous cars, Singularity University’s Brad Templeton returns to Big Think to examine some lighter fare: quantum mechanics and computing.

Big Think and the Kellogg School of Management have launched a new executive training program, Ethics in Action. This unique, expert-driven, program is designed to help corporations address the ethical […]

How new developments in measuring the highest-energy particles and earliest signals from the Universe are teaching us what all this is. Big questions in the field of Cosmology are often […]

Encounters in the fourth dimension. We all have an intuitive sense of what a dimension is. There are only three perpendicular directions in which we might move, which we might […]

How many times have you heard a politician or school board official vow to improve education by increasing students’ access to technology? Perhaps you’re familiar with the now-dormant plan to […]

While ambiguity and shades of gray tend not fit the paradigm of technological solutions, they represent the arts’ most powerful capabilities: to express life with all its complexities. 

In a new book, two technologists paint a rosy portrait of our future, describing how cutting edge technology could benefit large industry–as long as humans don’t muck it up in the mean time, that is. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist Edward O. Wilson draws from Darwinian theory to posit the appearance and characteristics of an extraterrestrial life form. “E.T. is out there,” says Wilson, and their more like us than we may realize.

It’s 1962 in an America that has lost World War II…

How the Cosmic Microwave Background — the Big Bang’s leftover radiation glow — continues to shed light on the birth of our Universe. Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration. The announcement of the […]

Using the location data attached to billions of tweets, these maps indicate where the five best friend words — bro, buddy, dude, fella, and pal — occur most frequently.

It’s easy to forget that college athletes who sustain concussions are often kept out of the classroom as well as off the field. The effects of any sort of traumatic brain injury can pose critical and lasting risks to a student’s academic career.

And why do some of them appear to be right here in our own galaxy, which formed much later? Image credit: DSS, of SMSS J031300.36–670839.3, candidate for “oldest star.” “Let […]

It’s hard enough to measure here on Earth, so how do we measure magnetism for our Sun, the stars and even distant galaxies? “Nothing is too wonderful to be true, […]

Tech prognosticators think future iPhones will contain chips to make them scannable in check-out lines. Apple’s mobile wallet could replace plastic altogether.