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As far as I know, no major religion holds as a central tenet the unvacuumability of the penis.

Bees aren’t the most obvious choice when picking collaborators, but they’ve been cooperative in helping Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck create sculptures decorated with honeycomb. Her work is inspired by the […]

             Eaten any cheese lately? It was probably made with genetic engineering. Anything with sugar in it? Good chance that was made with genetic engineering too. Anything with ingredients containing […]

Good LORD the world suddenly seems a threatening unsettling mess, doesn’t it? Wars and plane crashes and disease and environmental catastrophe looming, all at once! It reminds me of Frank […]

The Chinese Characters Dictation Competition invited students to test their knowledge of written Chinese at a time when some say technology is eroding language skills. A nationwide audience tuned in for last Friday’s finale.

One of the only members of the Virgo Cluster… that isn’t located in Virgo! “[L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the […]

Driving through Yosemite a few years ago, we came upon a blackened patch of the park still smelling burnt. By the look of this map, it must have been the […]

Thought experiment: can we communicate across species in a way that might facilitate a greater deeper relationship between us? Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats gave it a shot.

‘All man’s miseries,’ wrote the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, ‘derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’ Silence can do sinister things to a human being. […]

To kids and adults who fear injections, Buzzy looks like a plastic toy. However, when applied to the skin, its vibrating motor and ice pack block the pain of the needle.

Judas was often portrayed as a redhead. But now the gingers are fighting back

A recent report authored by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Agency argues that overcoming our squeamishness about eating protein-rich bugs may make the crucial difference in overcoming global hunger.

Larry Arnhart, that rare student of political philosophy who claims to be Darwinian all the way down, criticizes me for saying Darwin is only partly right: Of course, many people […]

As we keep pushing forward with technology, we’ll be able to take more and more data from the invisible parts of the world and start feeding them into our brain.

If there’s one thing that unites the good guys in movies and TV shows, it’s a hatred of “procedure”—those legal niceties that get the bad guys out of jail and […]

The twisting path to becoming less dumb has led to many stops. 

What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America?

The development of cooking technology has both benefited our health and caused surprising physiological changes, such as prompting the emergence of the overbite, which all humans now have.

Here is a statement that shouldn’t result in anyone being called racist: I think religion is a particularly harmful way of viewing the world, because it encourages irrational thought, groupthink, […]

Charles Darwin’s correspondence reveals how he struggled with the work-life balance and how that influenced his decision on whether or not to get married. 

The last fifty years have seen a series of apocalyptic predictions, and not just of the Mayan Calendar variety. But human action should be motivated by present conditions, not doom and gloom. 

What’s The Big Idea? Scientists have given animals consciousness. Not through complex manipulation of the brain or through genetic manipulation, but by publicly acknowledging the consensus, for the first time […]

…in reruns, of ourse. So I realize I’ve been pretty short on pop culture commentary lately.  It’s not that I haven’t seen the new Wes Anderson movie and don’t have […]

If a so-called “gay gene,” exists, what is the evolutionary logic behind it? A new study offers evidence supporting the so-called “balancing selection hypothesis.”       

It is no stretch to say that Jonathon Keats is Big Think’s favorite living artist, experimental philosopher, or what you will. This is a man who has attempted to genetically […]

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 […]

In a whirlwind interview, Chomsky explains how Richard Nixon is a left-wing radical, how the ultimate expression of science is art and what climate change has to do with communism. 

The presiding philosophy of the Laboratory for Perception is ultimately more informed by the possibilities of the future than by the past. Eagleman is fascinated by the idea that we could import the technology into human biology to enhance our sensory perception of the world, broadening and deepening our reality.

Larry Arnhart, the leading Darwinian conservative, wonders whether I’ve converted to his faith, doubtless due to his efforts at sharing the good, evolutionary news. Larry is, of course, not an […]

The video below ought to put a definitive end to the No Sex versus Bad Sex debate.  Slovakian wildlife photographer Adrián Skippy Purkart captured a queen ant being ravaged by a […]