While nearly every social movement claims Enlightenment ideas—freedom, democracy and science—as their own, this very claim to authority cuts against the revolutionary English moment.
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By measuring a subject’s brain waves, researchers at Northwestern University can detect the presence of “concealed information”. The technique could be used to uncover terrorist plots.
Einstein once declared that he had no special talents, only he was passionately curious. What makes us want to know about things we don’t understand? The urge may be primal, scientists say.
A series of online tests known as Implicit Association Tests measure subconscious bias in areas of race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Follow the link to try.
Ahead of what is expected to be a boom in e-book sales, Amazon and Apple are accused of colluding to fix the price of electronic books depriving the market of competition.
As the science conference at Google HQ wraps up, the New Scientist reflects on some big ideas—from jet packs to the nature of time and gravity—presented in humble surroundings.
Elizabeth Wurtzel says cynics should embrace the Ground Zero Mosque as a bargaining chip: evidence of America’s tolerance to be held up as proof positive of our goodwill.
In countries that regulate prostitution, more sex trade workers end up on the street and disease rates rise.
To combat drunkenness, Halifax raised drink prices at bars. Will this also reduce unsafe sex and STI’s?
“If I wanted to sponsor a bill,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) asked, “and it said, ‘Americans, you have to eat three vegetables and three fruits every day,’ and I got […]
How do you persuade people to eat less and exercise more? We love to think it’s a matter of getting them to see facts and make good decisions, because that […]
When children are born with severe, debilitating conditions like some forms of spina bifida—in which some vertebrae on top of the spinal cord remain unfused and open—their lives can often […]
Traffic perhaps the greatest environmental liability and biggest daily annoyance of urban epicenters. Between the number of cars in the streets, the tendency of ground-level public transportation vehicles to jam […]
It’s a sad day for bigots in New York City. Opponents of a planned Islamic cultural center and mosque at 47 Park Place failed in their last-ditch effort to usurp […]
Could recycling actually be hurting the environment? In a recent policy paper, “Recycling Myths Revisited”, Professor Daniel K. Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) […]
Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), visited the Big Think offices today to talk about veterans issues and the announced drawback from Iraq. Rieckhoff stressed […]
Despite what the brainiacs from the Ivy League say, citizen’s arrests are not vigilante acts, according to Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. In fact, he insists that they have been […]
Orangutans spend all day exercising, slowly swinging from tree to tree, munching on low-fat plants, but they’re still kind of pudgy. It turns out that your average orang, for all […]
Diane Johnson at The New York Review of Books draws on five books to write about the current state of marriage in the U.S. which has the most marriages per capita in the West.
“Two years after the US subprime crisis, China is seeing its own real estate bubble as a result of massive state stimulus programs. Many economists are warning it could burst soon.”
Our insistence that luxury goods be genuine is unrelated to how the product functions, say psychologists. We demand authenticity because of an emotional attachment to a brand.
Air conditioning, sometimes necessary and sometimes about status, has made it possible for us to live almost anywhere in the world, but its effects on the environment are “chilling”.
The 75th anniversary of Social Security provides a moment to strengthen young people’s awareness of the program so they will be more active in supporting its reform.
“If there is one true religion in the US, it leads us to worship at the altar of technology.” The Guardian says only a cultural shift will deliver us from future disasters like those of BP and Toyota.
“The idea of a semantic web was proposed over a decade ago. Now a triumvirate of internet heavyweights—Google, Twitter and Facebook—are making it real,” says the New Scientist.
“Does affection for animals confer an evolutionary advantage? Our love of all things furry has deep roots and may have shaped how our ancestors developed language and other tools of civilization.”
A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology finds that wearing red makes men appear more powerful, more likely to make money and more likely to climb the social ladder.
Defining the current generation of twenty and thirty year olds is a controversial task for psychological researchers. Some say Gen Y is selfish and insensitive while others disagree.
At one level you can but admire the chutzpah of CNN President Jonathan Klein who is replacing the venerable Larry King with an English presenter, who King says he” wouldn’t […]
This poster cleverly plays on the half-remembered geological truth that the Atlantic Ocean, at some distant point in the past, really was a very narrow body of water.