European scientists who want to begin experimenting with geoengineering are being met with a host of concerns, including those of philosophers who worry about manipulating nature.
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Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon can take off at a moment’s notice and escape from pursuers into space. And can land on almost any patch of ground. Why can’t we do that in 2012? The problem is the puny power of the chemical rocket.
A new robotic sailboat aims to set navigation records while collecting data on marine life. In the future, such boats could be used for search and rescue operations and tsunami detection.
What’s the Big Idea? In the U.S., the weekends sandwiching the 4th of July are the most popular travel time of the year. The cherries are ripe, the pool water is swimmable, and […]
The massive southern continent was a supposed to be a counterweight for the lands of the northern hemisphere
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.
These specially-made relief maps showed blind children were sensitive to the geo-distributive aspect of maps
In Celtic legend, the island was almost perpetually shrouded in mist, and visible only for one day every seven years
There’s wicked, like the Wicked Witch. Wicked, as in evil. There’s wicked, like “It’s WICKED hot!” Wicked, urban slang for ‘very’. And then there are Wicked Problems; […]
This article was originally published on AlterNet. What kind of world would we have if a majority of the human race was atheist? To hear religious apologists tell it, the […]
What’s the Big Idea? There are not only wrong answers — there are also wrong questions, says Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and author of Big Think’s most recent Book of the Month. And sometimes […]
The Chinese can’t innovate, right? All that rote learning drummed into their cerebellums from birth. Cloning, now that’s a Chinese forte. It makes a comforting chestnut for Americans looking just over the horizon at what the […]
Deep water exploration is the hip thing to do these days, whether you’re James Cameron hanging out with “extremophiles” in the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, or if you’re […]
When the Concorde was retired in 2003, our technological ambitions had been checked by practical concerns about noise, cost and fuel consumption. Today, engineers are working on new solutions.
The ancient practice of forecasting the weather has evolved frustratingly slow over the course of thousands of years. Yet today we are employing super-computers to predict the weather.
James Cameron’s films may all cover wildly different terrain — the distant, futuristic planet Pandora in Avatar, an ill-fated Edwardian-era passenger liner in Titanic, and an alien-embattled underwater oil platform in […]
A robot designed to mimic the biology of a lamprey may soon be swimming through your body, with the capacity to detect the presence of diseases better than your immune system.
The self is a disruptive, false, and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing: when we awaken to knowing, we realize that all that goes on in us is a flow of “thoughts without a thinker.”
The fictional island has all the attributes necessary for a classic adventure story – including a bunch of intriguing place-names
As I have written here before, many of us are more worried about some environmental risks than the evidence suggests we need to be – mercury, bisphenol a, nuclear […]
If ideas are the currency of the future, then books are still the best way to trade these ideas with others. To celebrate the 600th blog post of Endless Innovation, I’ve put together […]
For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that […]
If you saw Martin Scorcese’s film Hugo you will no doubt remember the homage to the iconic 1902 Georges Méliès film A Trip to the Moon. The film depicts a lunar […]
NASA scientists have discovered a thin strip of oxygen in the atmosphere of Dione, one of Saturn’s 60 moons. It seems to be a rare case of oxygen existing without the support of live organisms.
In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, there’s a chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds” about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who discovered the four equations that govern electricity and […]
Have you ever had a mystical experience?
On the night of April 13, 1970, astronaut Jack Swigert famously beemed into NASA headquarters to declare “Houston, we have a problem.” A nation of inspired onlookers watched in suspense […]
A new venture called Planetary Resources plans to send a fleet of droids to space to prospect the most valuable near-Earth asteroids. The project will require billions of investment dollars but could yield a trillion dollar reward.
There’s been an alarming spike in lethal shark attacks on sea otters by sharks off California’s Central Coast, and no one seems to know why. While attacks by sharks — […]