My friend Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, offers a short and sweet argument against the death penalty: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that […]
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Google’s director of research, Alfred Spector, explains why artificial intelligence is crucial to the search company’s future in areas like natural language, machine learning and speech recognition.
Many believe that the next decade of technological innovations in the TV space will be defined by the possibilities of Internet-connected TV sets, such as tailored recommendations.
An environmentally friendly car which gets 200 miles per gallon and was partly made using 3-D printing technology has gone on show in Canada. Commercial production may begin in 2014.
The ‘hydrogen economy’ requires a lot of things, but first is an easy and cheap supply of hydrogen. A Penn State professor thinks he has found a way to access that supply.
Following the lead of its competitors, Amazon announced today that its Kindle users can follow a simple process to check out e-books from 11,000 community libraries across the country.
Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough in the “death of print” debate. If print books are limping toward extinction, why do so many writers—even the youngest, Web-savviest […]
The state of Georgia just killed Troy Davis. Which is to say, a number of individual human beings acting under the imagined authority of the state of Georgia killed Troy […]
By the time the Persians destroyed the Roman military garrison at Dura-Europos in 256 AD, the city high above the Euphrates River existed for almost six centuries since its founding […]
Most of us have little idea what the fighting in Sanaa over the past several days has been like. We can imagine if not quite comprehend the daily struggles that […]
At a time like this, when so many of us are dependent on the brave reporting of journalists in Yemen, it is fitting that the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression […]
A friend of mine posted a snarky comment on Facebook about how foolish FEMA sounds, announcing it’s preparing for the crash landing of a satellite somewhere this week. Somewhere […]
So there’s a lot of excitement about dolphins on BIG THINK these days. If we can figure out how to communicate with them, we can figure out how to communicate […]
Since its peak in 2007, the U.S. economy has lost almost 7 million jobs. Although the economy has begun to recover, jobs have been slow to return. Recent job growth […]
Today the Washington Post has a story up about the constellation of secret drone bases the US is building in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa […]
The Spaceship Company, a joint-venture between Virgin Galactic and a California technology company, has opened the doors of a new facility to manufacture suborbital spaceships.
Following up on her first book, renowned physicist Lisa Randall’s newest work explores the cosmos, from the atoms being smashed at the L.H.C. to physicists’ search for dark matter.
Over the past couple of weeks practicallyeverymedia site has run a piece on a new “economic theory” that argues that gender equality is driving down the price of sex. Valid […]
The same basic impulses – insatiable curiosity, good people skills, an appetite for risk – that led Kevin Mitnick into a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse with the FBI are richly rewarded in more prosocial professions.
Europe and America are now in a race against time to rescue their plans for joint missions to Mars. Unless solutions to budget woes are found, launch opportunities may be missed.
The Chinese government will launch a test module next week for the 60-ton space station it hopes to send into orbit by 2020. The unmanned module will be called the “Heavenly Palace”.
Nature may abhor a vacuum but it seems to tolerate just about everything else. Scientists have found yet another species, this time a deep-sea squid, that engages in same-sex sex.
The Denver Green School, classed as an Innovation Status school by the Denver Public School system, is trying out yet another innovation – growing their own food and serving it […]
To Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, and all other African American pundits who want to own the conversation about the black community—President Barack Obama is not Captain Save-A-Negro. He is the […]
The U.S. currently has the world’s largest prison population – not just on an aggregate basis, but also on a per capita basis. In fact, the U.S. now accounts for […]
The Nantucket Project, a festival of ideas held this month on Nantucket, Massachusetts, was an event filled with big names. And yet, one of the most memorable performances came from an up-and-coming poet few had heard of.
Ray Kurzweil is an expert at predicting the future. In tracking our progress in the technological-evolutionary journey, Kurzweil has identified six epochs, each of which is characterized by a major paradigm shift.
With the global financial crisis ongoing, the concept of “short-termism” has emerged as one underlying explanation for our current woes. Larry Summers and Eric Schmidt, among others, tackle this question during a lively panel at The Nantucket Project.
Hey, Michele Bachmann, you know who was really, really pro-vaccination? The Founding Fathers. Read all about it in my new article at The Nation. George Washington argued for mandatory inoculation […]
Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the oldest surviving senior UN staff members, reminded us recently in an article in the New York Times that a former Secretary General of the […]