All Articles

From an evolutionary perspective, our quickness to judge faces certainly makes sense. We need to know if someone is friend or foe, if he is strong or weak, if we can trust him or not. And we need to know quickly, before something bad happens. But is that quickness still as good when it determines national political outcomes?

{EAV:e47b9f8ac33e6b9b}Last summer I was invited to President Obama’s Twitter Townhall at the White House along with 139 other characters. Despite the grandiose setting and President Obama opening the event with […]

–Guest post by American University graduate student Laila Yette. Through the use of sites like Facebook and Twitter, President Obama’s 2008 campaign changed the way that we view social media […]

The blistering opinion rendered by Judge Jed Rakoff in the matter of the S.E.C. v. Citigroup Global Markets got very little attention yesterday in the midst of all the hoopla […]

If a public stock offering went ahead, some say Facebook would use the cash for more acquisitions and refine or work on new projects, such as a Facebook phone or netbook.

Amid growing concerns about the psychological impact of widespread digital ‘enhancement’ of photos comes a new tool to reveal how much fashion and beauty pics have been altered.

Are today’s climate change deniers waging a war on science? A new book by James Lawrence Powell spills the dirt on the new war on science.

–Guest by Audrey Payne, American University graduate student. It seems like there are so many problems discussed in the media every day- public health, the environment, the economy, political protests…. […]

Responding to privacy concerns, the European Commission plans to crackdown on Facebook allowing users’ most personal information to be used to create bespoke advertising.

If your product doesn’t need to be touched or demonstrated and is relatively small, your retail footprint is going to shrink. Bad news for retail clerks but exciting for entrepreneurs. because it could become easier to sell products in places that you couldn’t previously.Retail is going to shrink and proliferate. 

We’ve had the industrial revolution, and now we’re amid the data revolution. ‘Big data’ is a tectonic shift that will continue to affect many things we do for decades to come.

One of the odder cultural moments of the late 1970s that still sticks with me is the cinematic tour de force titled The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, the improbably story […]

Mapping the many paths from fully bearded to clean-shaven

In his Floating University lecture, Dr. Jeffrey Brenzel shows how our intellectual history is the story of rediscovering old ideas, and how these ideas will help you address permanent aspects of the human condition.

A couple of years ago Steven Landsburg controversially argued that if we want STI rates to fall then what is needed is more people participating in casual sex.  As counter-intuitive […]

How could science fiction get it all so wrong? Big Think posed this question to Jim Kakalios, Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota in a previous post. In […]

After decades of dictatorship, the people of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous state, have gone to the polls sharply polarized and confused over the nation’s direction.

Could the European Central Bank help avert a Euro meltdown if it bought up the bonds of ailing euro-zone countries on a bigger scale, thereby easing fears of their default?

Alberta, Canada is widely recognized as having one of the best schooling systems in the world. A recent article in Alberta Views highlighted the differences between its system and America’s, […]

Governor Brownback’s communications director, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, has taken a 100% certified molehill—an indecorous tweet from a bored school kid who happened to be in an audience in front of the […]

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is invaluable to us today, says Lisa New, because it presents a particularly “clear-eyed and realistic tale of an economy in transition.”

The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers at the weekend will worsen the already deep American-Pakistani rift and could spark more tit-for-tat retaliation.

The latest round of international negotiations about climate change will prompt a lot of press coverage, mostly about the likelihood that, once again, the nations of the world will fail to agree on anything of substance.

I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They’re moving so that the mom can take a better […]

One hypothesis for the origin of religion is that it’s a kind of “costly signaling” – a way for people to prove their loyalty to the group by participating in […]

There are fears on both sides of the political spectrum in France that if China helps fund a European bailout it will come at the cost of some of their sovereignty.

How did we go from seeing genocide and other large-scale crimes against humanity as a consensus-free zone to today’s overwhelming acceptance of the “responsibility to protect”?

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is drawing to a close, and with it the brave and caffeine-addled efforts of over 200,000 writers worldwide. Unabashedly privileging “enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking […]

How does creativity work? One family is pioneering an idea called Kaleidoscope Mind which encourages creative thinking by changing the context around any given concept.

Several disorders whose symptoms are similar to autism have been traced to specific genetic mutations. Scientists hope that my toggling specific genes, an autism treatment is closer.