Words like “liberty” and “freedom” represent big ideas that are about as amorphous as they are valued.
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Thanks, climate change.
Cepheids are the hottest, brightest variable stars of all. When they’re surrounded by gas, a spectacular light-echo can follow. “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; […]
The “extraordinary authority” of maps helped perpetuate an erroneous image of West Africa for almost an entire century.
The shooting of two charismatic animals stirred international outrage. But a more important event to the developing world concern with animal welfare was publication of Carl Safina’s Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel.
The pictures of Stuart Palley tell a story that no words can. “the way to create art is to burn and destroyordinary concepts and to substitute themwith new truths that […]
Why do Vermeer’s paintings fascinate us so? Perhaps the reason lies behind a revolution in seeing in both art and science rooted in Vermeer’s 17th century Holland.
While we usually associate yoga with flexibility-inspired exercise, evidence shows a lack of psychedelic mushroom tea could lie at the foundation of this discipline.
Will nanobots someday deposit Shakespeare directly into our brains? In this week’s episode of Big Think’s Think Again podcast, we’re joined Buddhist-influenced psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein
A new study says critical thinking is a teachable skill, but who is going to teach it?
There’s no such thing as absolute time, but after 13.8 billion years, is anything relatively different? “The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since […]
Research has shown that drugs dogs routinely act based on the behavioral cues of their handlers, rather than acting on their sense of smell, raising important questions about the Fourth Amendment rights of anyone subject to search based on their actions.
Late night has become uninteresting and often unfunny, but all of that may change with the help of Stephen Colbert.
Hayek viewed markets as distributed-intelligence systems that evolved to compute resource allocations. We can now update that view with ideas from computer science, biological signalling, and evolution.
Couldn’t we just get all the nutrients we need from food?
The fantasies, institutions, and humans at Dismaland do not merely sometimes fail us — they are marked for death from the start.
In the first Republican presidential debate earlier this month, John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, surprised many with a performance that seemed to rescue the concept of “compassionate conservatism” from […]
An influx of humans into any environment can mean trouble for the local animal population.
Our observable Universe is finite, and so is the amount of information in it. Here’s what we may never know. “Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really […]
For art history, August 21 and 22 are the dates that will live in infamy. In some strange nexus of negative karma stretching over nearly a century, three of the greatest art heists of all time took place on these dates.
There’s a very curious link between topography and personality.
Disagreement helps prevent a company from becoming stale and succumbing to groupthink.
Gene Roddenberry would have celebrated his 95th birthday today. Many of his ideas have become reality, but some never will. “‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it […]
The hurdles in life presented by traumatic experiences, if treated properly, represent opportunities for momentous personal growth.
Experts say hovering parents set our kids up for failure — but why is that, and what can we do to change?
Hallucinations and distortions in reality ensue — no drugs required.
With the amount of destruction we’re causing, is it time we curbed our own population?
In a study that challenges conventional wisdom, two researchers determine that deftly playing office politics has a tendency to backfire.
Shell has permission to drill off the coast of Alaska, but other oil companies are warning of potentially harmful long-term consequences.
America has a big problem mistaking courage for cowardice and it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of bullies, according to The Baffler’s David Graeber.