The idea that our planet’s climate is changing is nothing new, says environmentalist and writer Bill McKibbon—in fact, the first person to theorize that our planet was warming was a […]
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“It’s obvious to anybody that the mind does much more than solve problems,” Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says in his Big Think interview. “But in a more fundamental way, […]
As the wake of destruction trailing the Gulf oil spill continues to look increasingly dark, I can’t help but think back to the speech that Interior Secretary Salazar made when […]
If Sylvia Earle’s older brother had never borrowed their neighbor’s copper diving helmet and taken his kid sister for a dip in the Weeki Wachee River not far from their […]
Carol Friedman always meets with her subjects before she photographs them. If she doesn’t, “then they’re just going to the dentist and they’re filled with fear.” But does the veteran […]
Has President Obama given up on being bipartisan? New Yorker editor David Remnick, author of the new Obama biography “The Bridge,” thinks that while the President’s political personality “aims toward […]
When we think of the Internet of Things, we tend to think of our microwave talking to our mobile phone or our car chatting with our home air conditioning system. […]
In the Matrix trilogy, God is portrayed as a software Architect. The fact that the first movie was released in 1999 is appropriate since software code had begun to exert […]
“For centuries in the past we’ve been in the center of the world.In fact, you know, ‘China’ in Chinese means ‘the middle kingdom,’ that we are in the middle of […]
Today marks the first installment of Big Think’s newest series, “Moments of Genius,” sponsored by Intel. We sat down with math and science thought leaders—from the inventor of the very […]
Over the past several years, China and Europe have sped by the United States in their development of high-speed rail systems. But now, as the New York Times reports, China might be […]
As a child, Dr. Michael Wigler was fascinated by the personality of a friend’s brother, “a very bright kid” who “never looked you in the face, constantly was throwing his […]
Flash question: does the Internet help dictators or undermine them? Now how about a slightly different question: does technology empower Big Brother or destroy it? Ad finally, what’s the difference between a dictator and Big Brother?
“Newspapers never made money on ‘news.’ Serious reporting, say from Afghanistan, has simply never paid its way. What paid for newspapers were the automotive sections, real-estate, home-and-garden, travel, or technology, […]
If looking for ancient bones to dig up sounds like hard work, that’s because it is. According to anthropologist Donald Johanson, even modern tools such as GPS don’t save scientists […]
“Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in […]
Many an aspiring screenwriter has pored over Robert McKee’s book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting,” trying to suss out the creative secrets that will result in […]
According to Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize Foundation, the cost of getting you and your spacesuit into orbit could soon be about $120. That would mean a price […]
Do you frequent porn sites? If you do, you’ll be pleased to know that you are a customer of one of the most tech-savvy industries in the world. It’s a […]
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 […]
Today marks the second installment of Big Think’s new series on business sustainability, sponsored by Logica. For the next eleven Mondays (through June 8, 2010), we will release in-depth discussions […]
Why don’t people notice that Apple has no qualms pressuring the police to barge into the homes of journalists? Or that we are now automatically signed on with our Facebook ID on 50,000 websites, all of which have added this functionality just in the last week? No, we are too busy standing in line for hours to buy the iPad or checking if our Facebook friends like Lady Gaga as much as we do to take stock of what’s really happening behind the curtains.
The distances separating the stars are so vast that it would take a very advanced civilization—perhaps thousands or even millions of years more advanced than ours—to bridge those distances. In […]
When you cover a beat, you get to know the good guys and the bad guys. If you don’t have strong opinions about who’s who, you’re probably not doing your […]
Americans continue to believe in race—“kind of like [how] people believe in witches,” says Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter. Yet the concept of race as we know it didn’t develop […]
The key to surviving global warming will be to develop an economy that empowers the impoverished to meet global clean-energy demands.
Today is the first day of Passover. To most Jewish people, that means a seder, matzo, wine, recounting the story that’s in the Haggadah. To Rabbi Niles Goldstein, it’s more […]
Today marks the second installment of Big Think’s new series on business sustainability, sponsored by Logica. For the next twelve Mondays (through June 8, 2010), we will release in-depth discussions […]
“What do you see?” asks Alfred Molina as Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko in John Logan’s two-character bio-drama, Red, which just began a run on Broadway after a successful tour […]
Why does the Web version of a newspaper look so different from the print version? It may sound like a simple-minded question, but the answer cuts to the heart of […]