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Could recycling actually be hurting the environment? In a recent policy paper, “Recycling Myths Revisited”, Professor Daniel K. Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) […]

Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), visited the Big Think offices today to talk about veterans issues and the announced drawback from Iraq. Rieckhoff stressed […]

Despite what the brainiacs from the Ivy League say, citizen’s arrests are not vigilante acts, according to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.  In fact, he insists that they have been […]

Orangutans spend all day exercising, slowly swinging from tree to tree, munching on low-fat plants, but they’re still kind of pudgy. It turns out that your average orang, for all […]

Diane Johnson at The New York Review of Books draws on five books to write about the current state of marriage in the U.S. which has the most marriages per capita in the West.

“Two years after the US subprime crisis, China is seeing its own real estate bubble as a result of massive state stimulus programs. Many economists are warning it could burst soon.”

Our insistence that luxury goods be genuine is unrelated to how the product functions, say psychologists. We demand authenticity because of an emotional attachment to a brand.

Air conditioning, sometimes necessary and sometimes about status, has made it possible for us to live almost anywhere in the world, but its effects on the environment are “chilling”.

The 75th anniversary of Social Security provides a moment to strengthen young people’s awareness of the program so they will be more active in supporting its reform.

“If there is one true religion in the US, it leads us to worship at the altar of technology.” The Guardian says only a cultural shift will deliver us from future disasters like those of BP and Toyota.

“The idea of a semantic web was proposed over a decade ago. Now a triumvirate of internet heavyweights—Google, Twitter and Facebook—are making it real,” says the New Scientist.

“Does affection for animals confer an evolutionary advantage? Our love of all things furry has deep roots and may have shaped how our ancestors developed language and other tools of civilization.”

A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology finds that wearing red makes men appear more powerful, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder.

Defining the current generation of twenty and thirty year olds is a controversial task for psychological researchers. Some say Gen Y is selfish and insensitive while others disagree.

At one level you can but admire the chutzpah of CNN President Jonathan Klein who is replacing the venerable Larry King with an English presenter, who King says he” wouldn’t […]

This poster cleverly plays on the half-remembered geological truth that the Atlantic Ocean, at some distant point in the past, really was a very narrow body of water.  

I got an email from an editor at a major black-oriented website last week, asking me if I would write a rush article on Charles Rangel the same Thursday afternoon […]

While Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece The Gross Clinic undergoes a facelift on the east coast in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew (my […]

Tell your children not to write anything down. Tell them that this phenomenon, this global mania for being public about every aspect of our lives, is something that will catch […]

The thirteen-story, $100 million Islamic center and mosque planned for 45-47 Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site has stirred a swell commentary across the U.S., […]

Many people ask me if science is getting more glamorous. Well, I hope so. The world of Hollywood and the media tell us that if you are beautiful and strong […]

David Heinemeier Hansson was bored until the day he met Ruby, and then his life changed forever. No, this isn’t a love story—not a conventional one anyway—it’s a story of […]

“In popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case.”

The more oppressive the government, the more its citizens will defend it; people support corrupted politicians more fiercely; people with strong family ties are less trusting.

Michael Shermer refutes Deepak Chopra’s modernized conception of God which he bases on ideas originating from quantum mechanics. Chopra demonstrates medieval reasoning, says Shermer.

“You don’t have to be a conservative to think it a bad idea to promote unionism in an economy struggling to climb out of a deep economic hole,” says Judge Richard Posner. “You can be a Keynesian.”

Despite WikiLeak’s massive publication of Afghanistan war logs, there remain undisclosed elements to the war. For example, who we are fighting, says The New Yorker.

The Chinese economic model is not sustainable in the long run and the global community must do all it can to help China rise again. Kevin Gallagher at The Guardian says China is too big to fail.

Often cited as a retroactive justification for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the issue of women’s rights is still what separates the West from the Middle East, writes Max Dunbar.

Advertising billboards like ones seen in the film Minority Report, which can recognise passers-by and target them with customised adverts, are being developed by engineers at IBM.