Dear Mr. or Mrs. Baby Boomer Executive, I hope you are sitting down. I have some startling news to share with you: your millennial initiatives are worthless. The tools and […]
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Stephen’s Quintet is the name of the first identified compact galaxy group. This remarkable image of it was captured with data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the Subaru Telescope […]
“Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.” […]
Good news for mice! Bad news for cobras. Researchers have engineered the strongest constructed muscle yet–ten times stronger than all previous attempts, and successfully implanted it into mice. It’s so […]
AMC just released a trailer for its Silicon Valley drama series “Halt and Catch Fire.” There’s just something about geeks and hackers yelling at each other as though they’re in […]
Working at Big Think, we’re often asked, what’s it like to interview Dr. Michio Kaku? The Big Think expert and author of The Future of the Mind is a rock […]
Of all the galaxies in our local supercluster, one outweighs them all. “I recognize my limits, but when I look around I realise I am not living, exactly, in a world […]
America has been undergoing a marijuana revolution of sorts. Marijuana is legal for medical use in 20 states and the District of Columbia, and now it’s sold in Colorado and […]
Einstein’s quantum description of light earned him a Nobel prize, but he’s mostly remembered for relativity. At their core, special and general relativity are, in fact, not relative. Explore Einstein’s […]
All maps tell lies, but this one does it better than most.
“Education must be the only sector that hasn’t already been completely revolutionized by technology,” says Wendy Kopp, the CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, and the founder and chair […]
Around 220 million light years away, the spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 speeds through the galaxy cluster Abell 3627. Hubble captured an image of the distant galaxy. As ESO 137-001 travels, its gas […]
“We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” – Neil deGrasse […]
A regional division of the NLRB has ruled that Northwestern’s football players are more like employees of the university than students. So they are entitled to unionize and bargain collectively […]
The way they form is amazing enough, but then the time-lapse video left me speechless. “Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There […]
The physics of accurately knowing just how much time has passed. “While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any […]
Science and poetry both depend on metaphor. Science typically uses at least two. The first is usually Pythagoras’s astonishingly fruitful, but also limiting, “all things are numbers.” The second shapes […]
More than 20 people are dead and at least 90 are missing and presumed dead after a huge hillside of mud and clay and rock collapsed and slid down into […]
It’s a delicious treat to watch godless libertarians rise to the defense of Protestant evangelicals this week.
In my debut column last week, I discussed how the financing landscape is radically changing through crowdfunding. Naturally, everyone is catching onto this phenomenon, including celebrities. But now that Zach […]
“Regrets, I’ve had a few,” Frank Sinatra warbled in “My Way,” before adding wistfully, “But, then again, too few to mention.” Sinatra sang that song at the end of a […]
Now that the Higgs has been discovered, the Standard Model is complete. But are there any other new particles? “The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws […]
Writers loathe using cliches like “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” But sometimes, it can’t be helped, especially when you’re Christopher Hitchens getting arrested in communist Czechoslovakia. He tells a very “Hitchensian” story […]
While it’s not a Frankenstein’s monster, it’s still an exciting advancement toward creating life from scratch. The journal Science announced that a team of scientists produced a yeast chromosome. The […]
Before there was David Lynch’s Dune, there was Jodorowsky’s Dune. This film project never made it off the ground, but the team that the mad genius avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky […]
When it comes to picking a beverage of choice, it should be water, plain and simple. Our bodies are around 60% water. So why shouldn’t we be chugging our eight […]
The missing Malaysian jet may have ignited a fear of flying in many. Statistically, a missing plane is an extremely rare occurrence. What we should all be terrified of when […]
Anant Agrawal is the president of edX, an online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT. As Bill Clinton said at the Global Education & Skills Forum, it’s important to […]
Change is hard to do. In fact, for many “change” is a dirty word. Regardless, our society is set-up to embrace change. Every New Years Eve we flaunt our resolutions […]
A while back I wrote a post about the problem of pseudoscience in TED talks and how this problem was made so much worse by the failure across the board […]