Suppose you have a disease…an incurable fatal disease…and a drug has just been approved that can treat that disease. The drug only works in about half the people who […]
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Every art lover knows the story. Sad, mad Vincent Van Gogh went into the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise on the morning of July 27, 1890 to paint Wheatfield with Crows […]
New, free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data are providing competition for premium providers such as TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Navigon.
Finding out that Facebook still tracks them when logged out has driven many users to use the Google Chrome extension Disconnect to help protect their privacy.
Just as peacocks spread their tails to signal virility, men have used conspicuous consumption to signal wealth and women have used the appearance of youth to signal fertility – all […]
4chan founder Christopher Poole, knwon for promoting the value of digital anonymity, on why the Web should recognise that, “We all have multiple identities. It’s not abnormal.”
Alongside usability and user experience, Web design must provide PET (persuasion, emotion, trust) to yield the right results from users. Paul Rouke says Booking.com shows how.
Ford is installing a feature in its new vehicles—and many of its older ones—that uses its voice-activated technology to read text messages out loud.
The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, […]
Here’s an interesting graph from a new paper by Kenny Shirley and Andrew Gelman: The most obvious thing here is white Americans have been and remain much more likely to […]
Last Thursday I recorded a bloggingheads session on Yemen with Afrah Nasser. In the 43-minute video we talked about the current stalemate in Sanaa and what, if anything, can be […]
“It turns out we’re not the only species that assembles ourselves into networks,” says sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis.
From hard data about China’s economic prowess to cultural markers like Sesame Street’s new impoverished puppet, it sure seems like the U.S. is losing ground, and fast.
Globalization brings structural changes to national economies faster than they can react, resulting in unemployment, skill mismatches and wealth inequality, says Nobel Laureate Michael Spence.
On October 31st, the United Nations estimates that the seventh billion child will be born. But people have worried about overpopulation since long ago. Are we approaching a threshold?
This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership […]
Despite the emergence of social media, social change still requires the use of physical space. Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park are proof of America’s dwindling public sphere.
If I had to give the Occupy Wall Street movement a piece of advice, I would tell them to focus their growing chorus against Wall Street excesses on corporate governance […]
The Indian motor company Tata has been marketing its newest model, the Nano, as the world’s cheapest car. But sales have been abysmal as people shirk the stigma of poverty.
Wikipedia is universally relied on and universally distrusted. On the one hand, it’s a stunning repository of knowledge that has rendered the World Books of my not-so-distant childhood utterly obsolete; […]
How a riddle involving one river, two islands and seven bridges prompted a mathematician to lay the foundation for graph theory
A string of new studies suggests that the modern chase after happiness—and even happiness itself—can hurt us. Happy, it turns out, is not always the way you want to be.
Donating your brain to science is no easy decision. After consent is given, interviews are held at the donor’s home in order to gather information on their mental functioning during life.
Public support for income redistribution policies during the recession plummeted, especially among the poor. Why are so many acting against their own economic self-interest?
This serious and thoughtful—and maybe great—film is quite the labor of love. It’s a film about broken families and broken lives made by the father-and-son team of Martin Sheen and Emilio […]
Makeup is not just about good looks. Wearing makeup increases people’s perceptions of a woman’s likability, her competence and her trustworthiness, according to a new study.
It’s not always best to be polite. Steering around the truth to spare someone’s feelings can cause confusion and even have dire consequences when a person’s safety is at risk.
Well, I’ve been on Big Think for about two weeks now, and I’m starting to get used to the place. It’s a different experience from my old site, no doubt […]
Earlier this year, novelist Jane Smiley contributed an entertaining and provocative piece to Big Think’s “How to Think Like Shakespeare” series. In it she wrote that while composing A Thousand […]
Engineers have used carbon nanotubes to create artificial muscle that moves like an elephant’s trunk, which could be used to propel microscopic nanobots through the bloodstream.