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On October 3, 1948, at 3:50 pm, Peter Blume finished his epic painting, years in the making, titled The Rock (shown above). “After a turbulent decade in which Peter Blume embarked on false starts, endured debilitating anxiety, experienced self-doubt, and found his faith in the creative process renewed,” Robert Cozzolino writes in the catalog to the new exhibition Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, finishing The Rock must have been a great relief. Blume recorded that date and time the way many record the birth of their children, for The Rock was his precious baby, but completing it marked a rebirth of sorts for Blume as a different kind of artist. Shaped by political and artistic currents of the first half of the 20th century, Blume emerges as a difficult to categorize artist, but also as a fascinating visionary who struggled to paint a personal reality clinging to the foundation of hope.

Airlines have a contradictory purpose: they want to fill as many seats as possible to make the operating costs of each flight as low as possible, but they also depend on ticket sales to make profit.

Food is at the center of many American holidays. And changes to the climate pattern will affect where and how food is grown.

Serious, long-term stress can have dire consequences for your brain. That’s because the immune system and the brain are intimately related.

How new developments in measuring the highest-energy particles and earliest signals from the Universe are teaching us what all this is. Big questions in the field of Cosmology are often […]

Having job authority—the ability to hire, fire, and determine salaries—relieves men of symptoms of depression while worsening those symptoms in women.

While presenting one of the awards at the second edition of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Kate Beckinsale joked: “At Hollywood awards shows, when we sit back at the […]

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” said John Stuart Mill.

“You don’t spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you … It’s a small service, and there’s a lot of esprit de corps.”

While companies tend to wait until week’s end to announce bad news, doing so opens them up to scrutiny.

Barbara Corcoran: Build a Powerful Brand Barbara Corcoran learned early the value of building a powerful brand. In this lesson she teaches you shortcuts for standing out amidst the noise […]

The threat of territorial annihilation as a perverse incentive for the home front – on both sides

War, smoking, and obesity are straining the world’s economy, but there’s concern among researchers that obesity is most on the rise. If there’s not an action plan put in place, societies may be feeling the strain on more than just health-care costs.

The Great Orion Nebula is so great, it needed a second Messier object all to itself! “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others […]

Anxiety is not productive. The communications industry suffers from an existential crisis wrought by technological change. Standards have been upended, and the digital world — a universe of bits and […]

Everyone has broken the law at one point or another. People speed, park in handicap spaces, and jaywalk. How can you make people obey these simple laws? Fines don’t help, though a new incentive may be the answer.

According to one expert, a person tends to suffer from “expectation hangovers” when things don’t go their way. Harnessing present disappointment and employing it as a learning tool is key to achieving future success.

Everyone loves free food and corporations have caught on. However, is the purpose of this charity to boost office morale or chain staff members to their jobs. Psychologists think it’s a little bit of both.

If somebody tells you the risk of something is “1 in a million” or “1 in ten thousand” or even “1 in ten”, you still don’t know nearly enough to gauge how big or small that risk actually is. Get more information before you decide how worried to be.

“If someone is to consider black and white for their project I guess I would say the heads up that I would offer is that they need to be prepared to fight for it and lobby for that… Connections are not in color or in black and white. They’re invisible but just as real.”

“Frenemies” play an inevitable role in our extended social network. But our interactions with them pose real threats to our wellbeing, say researchers at the University of Utah.

A second scientific experiment, this time in America, has established that telepathy is possible. 

Although the creation of the Internet is thought to mark a new era in human history, its effect on society, especially in economic terms, has proven unremarkable.

When researchers presented canines with odors of other dogs, food, and their human masters, it was the scent of humans that excited dogs the most.

Only in America do people trample each other for sales a day after being thankful for what they already have.

“If we’re going to solve the problems that we’re trying to solve – and it’s not just for the Foundation, it’s for all of us, we’ve got to tap into the creativity and the capability and the innovation potential of the private sector.” -Julie Sunderland of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, from her recent Big Think Interview  

The best 2015 calendar makes a great gift. And you can win one for free just for reading this blog! “We are not the same persons this year as last; […]

It turns out that creativity resides within your brain’s left hemisphere as well. This was among the findings of a new study determining that creative impulses require activity throughout the entire brain.

A new Spanish law encouraging foreign investment allows entrepreneurs to obtain an extended-stay visa.

Half of the world’s population could soon reside in concentrated metropolises of 10 million or more people. Some expect there to be up to forty of these megacities by 2025.