A study published in the recent issue of Geology ties seismic events in central Oklahoma to wastewater produced from oil extraction and injected deep underground.
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It has wings coated in photovoltaic cells that power four electric motors, and next month, the Solar Impulse single-seater will fly from California to New York.
We are no longer in a period of rapid change! We have now entered a unique period of time, unlike anything any of us have ever seen, that can best […]
Yesterday on NPR, Jenna Chavez, a member of an evangelical church in El Paso, Texas, succinctly summed up the foundation for the argument against same-sex marriage: [Marriage has] been defined…for […]
MIT, Harvard and Stanford universities have all begun offering massive open online courses for free, but the larger ramifications on our national education may be adverse, say experts.
Two new mobile apps—one from Google and one from a smaller tech startup—may indicate how large scale data analysis, i.e. Big Data, can help you manage your daily affairs.
I advocate and defend things many people consider controversial. But it should be noted: Supporting adults’ rights to take their own lives, cut their bodies, solicit sex workers, etc., is […]
Update: Following the publication of this post and all of your thoughtful responses, the Big Think editors have decided to discontinue the Big Think’s relationship with Kanazawa. This is a response […]
Without paying money for goods and services, customers have little recourse when a company decides to radically change its game plan. Is your data in danger of disappearing?
Dan Fagin’s new book “Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation”, about a classic type of environmental story back in the 80s and 90s, the ‘cancer cluster’, is a […]
What Tyson has done is presented science from another angle. Call it the “we don’t know it yet” angle.
We spend 80 million hours a day watching videos on YouTube, and we would certainly like to have a few of those hours back. That is, of course, if we are […]
Experimental researchers at the Pentagon have just undertaken a four-year project to build artificially intelligent computers that can teach themselves new and better artificial intelligence.
Beyond the microchip lies quantum computing. Beyond that lies quark-scale computing, made from materials a billion billion billion times smaller than the current computational scale.
One of the must-see destinations for any traveler to New York City is The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Skirting the eastern edge of Central Park, the Met epitomizes the encyclopedic […]
“It’s absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it’s a myth,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, author of a new energy report by the National Research Council.
New statistics suggest that Bolivia is successfully reducing the number of its farmers who make a living off growing coca plants which, when processed, is the essential ingredient in cocaine.
1. Is the Purpose of Life to Make Babies? Why are we here? To fullfil some grand purpose or merely to perpetuate our genes? Is the act of helping to ensure […]
The Supreme Court could make history with its rulings on the legality of both California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
In the midst of Spain’s financial crises, a record number of its citizens are turning to Bitcoin, an online virtual currency used to exchange goods and services using complex computer software.
With the death of Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author and critic of the Western Canon, have we as a readership surpassed the political and aesthetic limitations of what we define as good art?
To allow society to prosper without sapping the planet of life, a new approach is needed. The economy must be seen as servicing society, which will only function properly with a thriving ecosystem.
I love smart design, when you can just look at a product or service and be able to see the methodical, thorough, detail-oriented thinking process that went behind it, aimed […]
We have reached a moral, legal and demographic tipping point in the controversy. Many signs point to an imminent marriage revolution: gay and lesbian Americans across the country will enjoy a right to marry — maybe before the end of the year.
Many conservatives are sympathetic to one argument against the Defense of Marriage Act: It’s a violation of the principle of federalism.
From the viewpoint of our genes, having children must be the meaning of life, says science writer Dr. Lawrence Rifkin. The only purpose of their existence is to be passed down to future generations.
Mindfulness, or mindfulness meditation, in which practitioners intentionally pay attention to the present in a nonjudgemental way, has become a useful tool in the stress management toolkit.
Experiments on animal cognition have found that intelligence is more dynamic than we once thought and that animals may be far more clever than we have historically given them credit for.
Using a technique known as optogenetics, neuroscientists have gained an unparalleled window into how individual neural networks work in the brain by borrowing jellyfish protein.
Dmitry Itskov, a Russian Internet mogul, is soliciting investment for what he expects will be the world’s first immortality research center. Immortality is not a bad return on investment.