If you are a Star Trek fan, you may long have been fascinated by the idea of a “replicator”; a device where you simply ask for something and the device […]
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We need poetry in our lives. It is not a luxury. It is not only for an elite. And it does something that no other art form can do, even […]
Legal scholar Laurence Tribe told Big Think today that he found Elena Kagan’s performance in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings to be “masterful in every respect.” Kagan, who was previously the […]
Johanna Sigurdardottir, Iceland’s prime minister, just got married. That in itself might not be particularly noteworthy, except for one thing—she married a woman. When Johanna was elected in 2009, she […]
“I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a creator.” As soon as I heard these words from Stephen Hayes through the phone, I sat back in my chair. […]
Researchers have demonstrated that “the neural circuitry that controls the sleep/wake cycle in humans may also control the sleep patterns of 17 different mammalian species.
“It seems fair to conclude that the 81-year-old, Canadian-born [Frank] Gehry is the most important architect of our age,” writes Matt Tyrnauer.
“In all Nabokov’s work, the kindliness of memory recreates Eden, just as perversity razes it to the ground,” writes Lesley Chamberlain. “We can lose our capacity to interpret the world as good. We can see only darkness.”
Imaging technology has now been used to assemble the first comprehensive map of global soil moisture that covers all land areas of the world, except for frozen soils at high latitudes and in some mountain regions.
Theodore Dalrymple is not sure that snobbery is actually a vice. “Everyone needs someone to look down on, and the psychological need is the more urgent the more meritocratic a society becomes,” he writes.
A new survey finds that while people around the world firmly support equal rights for men and women, many believe men should still get preference in jobs and education.
“Agnosticism is not some kind of weak-tea atheism,” writes Ron Rosenbaum. “Agnosticism is … opposition to the unwarranted certainties that atheism and theism offer.”
A new concept aircraft from Lockheed Martin could pave the way for supersonic flights over land by shushing the sonic booms created by the planes.
“What would you get if you crossed a whale with a shark?” asks Sid Perkins. “Maybe something like Leviathan melvillei, a long-extinct, hypercarnivorous whale with teeth longer than any T. rex ever had.”
Edward Tenner wonders whether business models, like major engineering projects and government agencies, have their own failure timetables.
Opening my daily Treehugger news email just now, I noticed that headline: ‘Dinner in the Dumpster’. Oh, I thought, how fun! An article about freeganism! In fact, the article at […]
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then John Scarlett Davis must have been the sincerest flatterer in all of England in 1829. In the exhibition Seeing Double: Portraits, […]
Is World Cup soccer moving away from the sort of team=country nationalism that leads to flare-ups like 1969’s “soccer war” between El Salvador and Honduras? It’s often remarked that the […]
Having now closed out the first six months of the year, it seems like a good time to look back on Big Think’s 10 Most Popular Videos of the First […]
Meanwhile, let another Rolling Stone reporter take your attention, for a different if no less compelling reason: a meditation on a writer we miss, David Foster Wallace. In the latest […]
Raw Story breathlessly reports that a researcher is experimenting with dangerous drugs to stop girls from growing up to be lesbians: “Afraid your daughter may be queer, or not be […]
Science fiction writer Catherine Asaro is also a ballet dancer and a math teacher who believes thatphysics and dancing are much more closely related than you might think
Harvard Business School Professor Ranjay Gulati doesn’t buy it when businesses today say they are “customer-centric”—because any company will say that they are. “It’s a platitude,” says Gulati. “There’s confusion […]
Albert Einstein once said something very profound. He said the Universe could have been chaotic, random and ugly—and yet we have this gorgeous synthesis at the origin of the Universe […]
Amit Chatterjee, the CEO and founder of Hara Technologies, consults with companies all across the country about how to go green. He stopped by Big Think recently to talk about […]
Cities’ ability to store heat means they are typically warmer than their surrounding areas. Given climate change, this could mean the end of cooler nights and more frequent heat waves.
Despite the Cold War mystique surrounding alleged Russian spies living within the U.S. under “deep cover”, Al Jazeera reports that spying is an eternal art, valuable to a nation no matter the epoch.
Garrison Keillor extrapolates the three stages of life from three generations casually standing on a street corner: Defenselessness, Cluelessness and finally Helplessness.
While surveillance that results in a speeding ticket may curb our wayward morals, Internet surveillance has no such benefit. Beware the illusion of your public persona, says The Economist.