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A debate is raging between economists: Some say the world has picked the low hanging fruit of innovation while others say a new era of unimaginable innovation is yet to come. 

If you believe that the nonprofit sector has a serious role to play in changing the world, then you’ve got to see this TED talk, given by Dan Palotta, AIDSRide […]

Imagine walking into a 1,300-year-old Buddhist cave carved from a cliff overlooking a stretch of the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. You point your flashlight and frescoes showing musicians […]

When the College of Cardinals convenes next month in the Sistine Chapel to elect the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, Michelangelo’s majestic ceiling will hang over them while his Last […]

This month, proceeds from the purchase of any of three branded items displayed within the popular social game FarmVille 2 will go to the nonprofit organization Water.org.

An information security training firm has erected a 6-by-8 foot miniature that mimics an actual town right down to the power systems and the (virtual) inhabitants.

Are computer viruses such as Stuxnet and Flame signs that a cyber war is near? These are only a couple of things that lead some to believe that a cyber war has the potential to take the place of a physical war.

A little over a year ago, I wrote aboutThe Herb Block Foundation’s gloom and doom report titled The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspapers is Over. Founded […]

On the occasion of National Poetry Month, Big Think spoke to Robert Pinsky, the 39th Poet Laureate of the United States, about the value of using poetic language in everyday life. Pinsky […]

If any painting could be labeled “not safe for work,” it’s Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L’Origine du monde (in English, The Origin of the World; and, once again, NSFW). Banned even […]

Valentines Day is fast approaching, Praxis readers, and you don’t want to be caught without a date. With Internet romance sites catering to virtually every interest —Christian Mingle for New […]

The arrival of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which the human race will exert a determinant influence over the environment, has some organizations saying a new strategy is needed.

You spend a lot of time talking about sharing and alternatives to ownership when your child’s in preschool. In the morning story circle you don’t want to be an avaricious, […]

It’s strange to think how young the Internet is, considering its enormity and complexity, and yet how powerful it has become as a means to connect people from around the […]

When news came out recently that artist Damien Hirst had ended his long and lucrative relationship with dealer Larry Gagosian and his international chain of Gagosian Galleries, there was more […]

Astronomers have discovered five new planets surrounding a star just twelve light years from Earth. One has a mass five times our planet’s and exists in its star’s habitable zone. 

“Now” trends are those with high energy and can be leveraged in the present; “Next” trends will begin to manifest towards the end of 2013 and gain traction through 2014; “Future” trends are fringe signals that will play out in 2015 and beyond.

An imaginary round table discussion with Anthony Robbins and Gautama the Buddha on being the best we can be. I was musing upon an interesting idea: What would it be […]

Chances are your company is one of the many taking a “wait and see” approach to one or more business issues right now. The approach plays out like this: “Should […]

Today, predictive analytics’ all-encompassing scope already reaches the very heart of a functioning society. Several mounting ingredients promise to spread prediction even more pervasively: bigger data, better computers, wider familiarity, and advancing science.   

Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and […]

Perhaps when mass killings really start to hurt the majority of the population, then we’ll take stronger action against them. But for now, we like them too much.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss finds creation stories depressing – not because they’re implausible, but because they extinguish curiosity and limit human agency. 

One day, I found a press release from an academic journal, calling attention to one of its articles. That is unusual enough, since the kinds of articles that Aaron Swartz–a […]

By Aaron Smith Since the beginning of the digital age, pundits have hailed virtual currencies as the future of our civilization’s money.  While it may be difficult to imagine a […]

Friends, a new world is waiting for all of us. It is a world without want, where every need is satisfied by boundless resources. It is a world of friendship, […]

Decades of research suggest that we are not only initially attracted to likeminded people but that familiarity is essential for healthy marriage. 

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

In question is nothing less than the nature of literature from an evolutionary perspective. 

We may not yet possess those cool transparent computers they have on CSI, but we live in a science fiction fantasy world of seamless information exchange, one in which even […]