Sorting out America’s fiscal mess is relatively simple. What’s needed is political courage. Tax code reform and spending cuts are essential, says The Economist.
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As reassuring as that G.P.S. voice can be, you may want to turn it off next time you’re trying to find your way. It may be dumbing down a region of your brain.
A healthy “attention span” is just another ineffable quality to remember having, to believe you’ve lost, to worry about your kids lacking, to blame the culture for destroying.
Humans could be walking on Mars within the next couple decades, for only a fraction of the cost if explorers are given one-way tickets. It’s not a suicide mission, say cosmologists.
In an effort to translate the Bible, Protestant missionary groups have documented many endangered languages and now secular anthropologists are showing interest.
Legendary physicist Sir Roger Penrose says he has found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos that is refreshed by Big Bangs, of which there have been many.
The idea of empowering the public is a contradiction in terms: power is gained, not granted. When you ‘empower’ people, you’re not empowering them, you’re enfeebling them.
Smart phones. One can’t imagine life without them. Ah, the endless convenience: looking up a restaurant on Yelp, finding out a movie’s rating on Rotten Tomatoes, seeing that cute guy’s […]
What do you call it when corporations get together with politicians to work out the details of legislation? Normally, of course, it’s called “lobbying” and is subject to federal regulations […]
Many people who don’t develop dementia are nonetheless discovered after their deaths to have the brain lesions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Do today’s college students define cheating differently? That’s the thesis of this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “Cheating and the Generational Divide.” The author claims that a […]
Scientists at CERN laboratory in Switzerland scored a major breakthough recently when they trapped atoms of anti-matter for the first time in history. Fans of Star Trek know the potential […]
Republicans are exploiting public outrage over whole body scanners and new invasive pat-downs to justify privatizing TSA screeners: As criticism grows of the government’s new full-body imaging scanners and the […]
Nothing like a good Nature paper to get the media’s attention, especially when it was about the biggest air traffic disruption in almost a decade. Of course, the headlines I […]
In a letter at the journal Science this week, my colleagues Ed Maibach and Tony Leiserowitz join with Tom Bowman, climate scientists, and other social scientists to issue a call-to-action […]
A new study from Ohio State researchers examines the impact of Al Jazeera on public opinion across Arab states, concluding that the news network strengthens Muslim identity among heavier viewers […]
Digital forces are threatening to weaken, or even destroy, the traditional basis, role and funding of the press. But what are the virtues it brings?
There seems no end in sight to Japan’s current decline, as jobs are lost, pensions cut, companies move overseas and social cohesion disintegrates.
Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.
Americans still venerate marriage enough to want to try it yet nearly 40% think marriage is obsolete. Time Magazine explains its latest survey and the future of the American family.
Astronomers have for the first time discovered a planet in the Milky Way that came from another galaxy. The planet has a mass of at least 1.25 Jupiters.
Nearly 1 million children work full time in Bolivia’s tin mines, in cemeteries, on buses, or in the markets. It’s a tough life, but at least they’re unionized.
A new book tells the story on the “triumph of capitalism” in the U.S. in the remarkable 35 years after the Civil War when American economy exploded in size.
The US military has issued a warning that social networking sites could endanger the lives of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan because of new features that reveal the user’s location.
Dire warnings about global warming can backfire if presented too negatively, making people less amenable to reducing their carbon footprint, new research shows.
Capitalism has solved the need to keep wages low and consumption high by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.
Over at the NY Times’ Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin has a post titled “An Inconvenient Mind” gathering thoughts from social scientists Dan Kahan and Robert Bruille on the UC Berkeley […]
“The critical thing is to figure out a way to get the technology engine restarted,” says the venture capitalist. “And we should have less government regulation to enable that.”
In the age of social networking and digital communities, there’s something to be said for analog art of appreciation – of people, of places, of music, of all the other […]
Technological innovation is the most important thing that developing countries should focus on, says Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and PayPal founder. In his most recent Big Think interview, Thiel […]