I encourage Waq al-waq’s readers to tune in to Rock Center with Brian Williams this evening at 10 pm EST for a segment on Ibrahim Asiri – who I wrote […]
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Engineers and scientists have struggled for years to figure out how to turn waste products into significant quantities of fuel. Two companies say they’re closer than ever before to solving this problem.
Big Think would like to congratulate Peter Salovey, who was named the 23rd President of Yale University last week. Since Salovey succeeds Richard C. Levin, whose tenure at Yale lasted […]
Scientists from MIT and Rice have created a self-assembling material comprised of ultra-thin layers, as well as a groundbreaking test that allowed them to observe up close how the layers worked to prevent projectiles from penetrating.
Just before leaving office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a farewell message in which he warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the […]
Two cancer patients are said to be doing better after their livers were “bathed” with drugs in an attempt to reach the tumors more directly and avoid common side effects.
It turns out that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe in October wasn’t a gaffe at all: it was, as some observed at the time, a reflection of how the Republican […]
This past weekend, I was in Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon V (“the fifth most annual Skepticon yet”). I had such a fantastic time at Skepticon IV in 2011, it was […]
A Princeton scientist suggests that the index most commonly used to predict droughts may not be reliable, raising questions about whether the world might get wetter as it gets warmer. Some scientists agree with him.
Residue of second-generation blood thinner-type poisons are increasingly being found in the livers of dead birds and other predator animals.
As more details about the Petraeus Affair leak out, it’s becoming increasingly clear that marriage infidelity is no longer what it used to be. The digital trail of a cheating […]
All 364 subjects under the age of seven exceeded cancer benchmarks for arsenic and DDE, among others. Ninety-five percent of preschool-age children exceeded non-cancer benchmarks for acrylamide.
What do Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century prison reforms have to do with David Petraeus and Google’s biannual “Transparency Report”?
A new paper says the “rogue planet” is drifting in space about 100 light-years away from Earth, raising speculations as to how many others are out there.
Brazilian scientists have been working on gathering the necessary materials to clone endangered species, but conservationists fear it distracts from existing habitat protection.
After all the votes were cast and counted and even Florida reached a conclusion, the election postmortem flew fast and furious and will continue to whirl until the 2016 presidential […]
The travel site has released Neighborhoods, a search feature that gives tourists details on specific areas in the cities they’re visiting.
There are 17 days left to submit an entry to the White House’s Health Design Challenge, in which designers are invited to change the current unwieldy, text-heavy electronic medical record format.
E la Carte has made its Presto tablet better able to withstand heavy usage, and included nifty features like an LED light that changes color according to table status.
As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]
Looking at the electoral college map, it’s easy to imagine that the U.S. is a sharply divided country. The northeastern and western coastal states are all blue, while a broad […]
Last week, voters in Los Angeles County passed a referendum requiring male actors in adult films to wear condoms in scenes depicting vaginal or anal intercourse. Measure B was an […]
There is a hole in higher education and it might not be where you expect. This hole in the system is causing substantial problems for our country, including for taxpayers […]
You know the old Facebook line: relationships are complicated. Paul C. Brunson, the Modern Day Matchmaker, knows that better than anyone else. And his new book, IT’S COMPLICATED (BUT IT […]
Launched yesterday, the Netpage app lets users save and share content directly from magazine pages to their online networks. Their first partner: 80-year-old Esquire.
Mind Lab is an awesomely mind-bending little project created by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency. It consists of four fully interactive classes of about fifteen minutes each on the workings of […]
Fake profiles, fake pages, fake likes: All of them create problems for the world’s largest social network, which bases its credibility on the ability to gather together real people and data.
I’ve written some overarching thoughts about last week’s presidential election, but I wanted to dwell on one of its more fascinating aspects: the extent to which the Republican party was […]