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Google’s self-driving car and the automobile industry’s related efforts are breathing life into the seven-plus decade dream of the automated highway, which was first introduced as a concept at the 1939 […]

Despite knuckle-gripping tension and mass nuclear proliferation during the Cold War, not a single detonation has caused mass civilian casualties since 1945. According to investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, such good fortune is nothing more than blind luck.

We’ve known for a very long time that our body language influences others. What we’re only now beginning to understand is how our body language alters the way we ourselves perceive the world.

Imagine standing in a bare room in which a small, 4-billion-year-old rock hangs from the ceiling by a thin wire as three vocalists whistle and breathe on it to make it swing. For some people, such a scenario might be the nightmare version of contemporary art run amok, so far “out there” that it’s never coming back. 

This week the agency put out a Request for Information in hopes of attracting creative thinkers who can help them “achieve the most science at minimum cost.”

A new study shows that when you pull an all-nighter or deprive yourself of sleep, you also put yourself at risk of developing false or inaccurate memories.

Big Think is a knowledge forum that features insights from the world’s leading thinkers. Whether it’s Michio Kaku discussing energy sources of the future or Stephen Dubner, the co-author of […]

As more of our professional and pleasurable reading shifts to screens, the way in which we read is changing. And while technology is not exactly eating away at our brains, it is causing us to read less deeply.

Just as Shazam helps identify songs from snippets, a new technology developed by British scientists will be able to match bird calls with a virtual database. If made into an app, it would give a whole new definition to the phrase “tweeting.”

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has offered employees the chance to take an hour off of work for an afternoon snooze, just as long as the workers make it up by arriving to work earlier or leaving later.

Twitter is experimenting with ways to infuse your feed with “relevant content” by people you don’t follow. Is this the end of Twitter as a democratic platform?

If we are told a particular wine is artisanal and another is more mechanically produced, we are more likely to grade the artisanal wine as better tasting and more expensive. 

With Project Adam, Microsoft has thrown down the artificial intelligence gauntlet. The company boasts that it’s new deep-learning system is better in terms of speed, efficiency, and accuracy than Google’s best attempts.

Yes, there is a map for that.

            It’s interesting that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was not only a U.S Senator and U.N. Ambassador, but a sociologist. Interesting, because Moynihan is usually credited with the pithy sounding observation […]

James Gleick ponders the paradox in information theory that since information is based on surprise, it is also chaotic and in many cases devoid of meaning.

Consciousness is what it’s like and how it feels to be you. Thus, consciousness exists in a realm of irreducible subjectivity with which science isn’t always comfortable.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” said John Lennon. The most important details in life can pass us by if we’re not careful. Noticing […]

Although we live in an information age, we don’t really know what information even means.

Researchers working on a new project at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University have begun tracking, in real time, cases of false news and the stories debunking them […]

Researchers stationed at a Zambian animal sanctuary were amused when they observed a female chimpanzee named Julie stick a piece of grass in her ear.

Let me start by saying that I love this month’s Atlantic cover story, “The New Science of Old Age.”  I’m not raising it up just to knock it down. The piece, […]

And, in general, how would you be able to tell? Image credit: Mahdi Zamani, via http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/guests_photos.asp?ID=5001660. “When I was ten all I knew was that I hated the weird words […]

“Don’t just stand there, let’s get to it. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it,” Madonna lied and “Vogue”-ed way back in 1990. Contrary to popular opinion, posing is hard work, made even harder by the requirement to look effortless. The reigning “Queen of Pose,” Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha has been clocked at 160 different poses per minute and viral videoed striking 50 poses in 30 seconds. When photographer Steven Sebring approached Rocha back in 2010 with the idea of a project involving one model striking a thousand different poses captured using Sebring’s revolutionary, 360-degree photographic technology, it seemed a match made in modeling heaven. Study of Pose: 1,000 Poses by Coco Rocha tests the limits of expression by the human form while capitalizing on the latest in technology to produce no less than a new manifesto on posing the human body as an object to be both admired and accepted for all its truth and beauty.  

What if our shorter attention spans aren’t a growing weakness but rather an emblem of a more advanced, discerning brain?

From self-parking cars to voice-recognition software on smartphones, the ability of individual machines to learn from collected sets of data is the forefront of artificial intelligence research.

It’s not for sex; it’s for affirmation, says the marriage expert Schmuley Boteach. Men cheat, by and large, because they feel like failures. They stray because they seek an outside arbiter. They need someone not their wife or partner  to proclaim them worthy.  

The Uniform Law Commission supports a plan that would grant loved ones access to a deceased person’s social media accounts unless otherwise specified in a will. Opponents of the plan say it infringes upon privacy rights.

In her recent Big Think interview, Perel explains that sexuality and marriage have experienced a radical shift over the past few generations. What was once considered a dutiful bond now serves our more individualistic culture driven by love and desire. Where these two feelings meet and diverge is at the core of eroticism.

To what degree are you allowed the privacy to grieve the loss of a family member? Christos Catsouras found out in October 2006. His 18-year-old daughter, Nikki, died after slamming […]