Bill Nye – who turns 58 today – says teaching science needs to be a hands-on experience in order for it to be really effective. Like the funniest moments in life, you might say, you had to be there.
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Richard Feynman was struggling with an existential crisis only a member of the Manhattan Project could truly experience: “Put another way, what is the value of the science I had dedicated myself to–the thing I loved–when I saw what terrible things it could do? It was a question I had to answer.”
Whatever the mania, you can be certain that credentialed egg-heads, professional do-gooders, and compulsive busy-bodies will claim access should be curtailed, controlled or even cut off, “for the children.”
Some students take the position that the best way to change an organization is from the inside. Therefore, going to work for a company that, for instance, produces tobacco products, is the best way to affect change.
An intriguing piece of research has added an unexpected category of things that evolution may have taught us, down in our DNA, to be afraid of. Plants.
We all know Rockwell’s Freedom from Want by heart, even if we don’t know its title.
Guest post by Kevin Flora(Cross post from kevinflora.com) Forrest Gump (1994) provides an interesting and unexpected viewpoint of his exercise routine. He runs… to run. He is not looking to […]
There are seven billion of us now and contrary to the evening news we all get along, kind of.
Michael Gazzaniga: Scientists we sometimes get annoyed with, but not science.
Embracing messiness and understanding that it is a contribution to the creative process is something that writers and creative types have got to cultivate.
Malcolm Gladwell: It drives me crazy when people in the technological sphere inflate the importance of the kind of tinkering they do with these sort of software gadgets that they come up with.
Malcolm Gladwell: I don’t know why we run from explanations of success that include a healthy dose of serendipity.
We always fall back on this notion that the rest of the world is somehow the way that we are.
Michael Gazzaniga: Why does the human always seem to like fiction? Could it be that it prepares us for unexpected things that happen in our life?
Robert Thurman: Everybody has a Buddha in there and Buddhas have more fun.
Scientists are unsure whether a coronal mass ejection from the sun – pictured here – took the sungrazing comet out.
Learning faster is becoming more and more important, and we simply learn faster in cities than we could on our own.
This is the question the Supreme Court will ask in a few months when it hears oral argument in two cases it agreed to consider today. Both cases involve a […]
Countries like Finland, South Korea and Poland got smarter not by spending more money or creating more tests. The children learned how to think, and to thrive in the modern economy.
When the President gives a speech today, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Big Think, “you might hear the pundits tearing it down before he even finishes the speech.”
As François Jacob famously said, evolution is a tinkerer and not an engineer. When you’re a tinkerer, you throw things together to solve the problem at hand.
In September I covered a paper that described the massive amount of bias created in the legal system in parts of the US where forensic laboratories are paid in return […]
How do 21st century photo editing techniques impact classic conceptions of beauty? Just have a look at the image above, by the Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano. Giordano’s Venus project gives Photoshop makeovers to paintings such as Botticelli’s La Nascita di Venere.
The screenwriter Danny Strong explains how listening to critical feedback is essential to the creative process.
The tens of thousands of turbines generating power around the world on land and, increasingly, at sea, represent a stunning reversal of fortune for an industry that fifty years ago was virtually non-existent.
In science, and genomics in particular, the difference between what we know and what we don’t is enormous. At this point, we’re still figuring out how much we don’t know.
Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, tells Big Think that people should have access to anything that is fundamentally theirs.
MIT’s Donald Sadoway advocates “science and service to society” as opposed to “science and service of career building.”
The less we know about something like energy, the more likely we are to use and abuse it in ways with long-reaching, harmful consequences.
If you have not found a partner or if you’re not sure if you want to compromise or you want to live with someone else for the rest of your life there’s just a lot of hope for you out there from the science.