Most short lists of greatest living artists will have names such as David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, (BigThink.com’s own) Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, or Jeff Koons. But who would […]
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NASA went for the Gold with the Curiosity space probe, and scored a perfect 10. Perfect start, perfect execution, perfect dismount. And Curiosity is the Godzilla of space probes, with 10 […]
Mark Ruffalo’s energy campaign offers a powerful model here – one that leverages cultural power, scientific knowledge, and bottom-line economic reasoning to address the kinds of complex, 21st century problems it takes collective intelligence to solve.
A couple years ago, the government of New York City created a program on resilience to climate change and sea level rise. Many of the steps that program laid out […]
Part 1. Monkeys There’s an apocryphal story about monkeys – based loosely on a real experiment – that goes something like this: Stage 1. Monkeys 1, 2, 3, 4, and […]
Their are other places in the solar system which might harbor life, say astronomers. Given probable budget cuts, some scientists are criticizing NASA’s singular focus on the Red Planet.
President Obama’s new healthcare law is good news for the 30 million people who will have access to health insurance. However, health experts worry if the medical profession industry will be prepared to meet the demand.
People who think a risk will actually affect them and their families and communities, as opposed to somebody else, worry about that risk more. People who think a risk is […]
Years ago, when I was a young reporter working for a New England newspaper, I was told, more than once, that our city editor had “the personality of a door […]
If phantom islands can be discovered as recently as 2012, maybe there are still more of them out there.
Dear England, The British press has had its knickers in a twist over Americans appropriating Britishisms for some time, whingeing about it in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The […]
On the basis of having for a time shared a house with a John Roberts clerk who conveyed to me no useful information about the Chief Justice’s cast of mind, […]
Individuals’ personalities – yours and mine included – are not as stable as we think they are.
Willpower is a limited resource easily drained by everyday activity.
It has recently occurred to me that I’m Martian. My friends have taken to smiling and nodding when I talk about this. Some of them have been persuaded. Some of […]
So deeply rooted, says Tom Doctoroff, is the Western belief in individual freedom, that it is nearly impossible for us to accept the fact that in Chinese culture, the individual does not exist outside of her network of familial and communal obligations.
From Fortune 500 companies to Presidential campaigns, it seems everyone has bought into the power of memes to move a message. And nobody bought in earlier than Ben Lashes, the […]
As we mourn the passing of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, let’s not forget what took us there in the first place. No, it […]
After years of hearing about the Social Media Revolution, many of the rebellious, counter-culture figures are starting to disappear to the sidelines as the big money Wall Street investors and traditional […]
I’d like to get the Freakonomics guys to explain this paradox of K-12 education: The more money you spend for your children’s education, the fewer days they’ll actually be educated. […]
Astronomers are coming to know more about a planet twice the size of Earth which revolves around a star in the constellation Cancer. Just 40 light years away, the planet is a brother of sorts.
As I’ve been writing about for the past several years, the key to public engagement on climate change is to tell personally relevant stories about the issue. An effective method […]
In Celtic legend, the island was almost perpetually shrouded in mist, and visible only for one day every seven years
I usually write optimistic posts. This is going to be a scary one. I apologize in advance. While I was in Columbus last month, I mentioned the furnace-like heat. Well, […]
More or less anybody who has ever done anything newsworthy can cite, as Henry Rollins can, some turning point at which they made a risky decision that paid off, and a lifelong sense of mission not easily derailed by minor failures.
Psychology is rich in findings that emerge from complex statistics done on the behavior of college students behaving for money or course credit. It’s fair to wonder, then, how well […]
Russia has drilled through 2 miles of ice to examine a lake trapped in darkness for 14 million years. In doing so, Russia beat out the UK and US who are on their way to other ancient lakes.
University students and private companies are racing to build the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. Google and the X Prize Foundation are offering $20 million to the winner.
I’ve never understood those weight guessing games offered at your more low-rent carnivals. Yet, across the country, people hand over their hard-earned dollars, driven by a curiosity about whether their […]
The 2012 Skyscraper Competition sponsored by the architecture journal eVolo inspired some amazing designs that predict the planet’s future population and geographical changes.