Slate’s resident advice columnist recently printed a letter from an adult child with a very unusual problem: Dear Prudence, My mother died a decade ago; neither she nor my father […]
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“Do you know what the common point between Facebook, Google, Blue Jeans and Twist music is?” was the question Charles Thou, co-founder and CEO of Studyka asked Jason Calacanis at […]
For the past few weeks I have been going back and forth with Frank Cilluffo and Clint Watts over their paper on what to do in Yemen. (Their original post […]
I asked a friend of mine a few months ago how I would know when I had crossed the line with my economic analysis of sex and love to which […]
Maybe Americans have gotten smarter. Maybe we have started to realize, despite the disembodied economic statistics delivered by the serious and profound voices that ooze out of our TV’s every […]
Pay attention to what isn’t there, not just what is. Absence is just as important and just as telling as presence.
After touching down early Thursday morning, the Atlantis shuttle is now officially a museum piece. It will be retired at the Kennedy Space Center Museum in Cape Canaveral, Florida. “Job […]
We’ve reached a unique paradox in American political culture today: Both liberals and conservatives view the mainstream media as biased, yet tend to believe that their own ideologically-like minded outlets […]
An improved process for making large amounts of pure metallic carbon nanotubes could hold the key to overhauling the electrical power grid with more efficient transmission lines.
The next year in tech will be all about the cloud, i.e. building connections between P.C. and post-P.C. devices, whether phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers or Roombas.
The inventor of a new machine that decodes D.N.A. with semiconductors is one of several pursuing the goal of a $1,000 human genome—2013 is the industry’s new target date.
Fighting the scourge of childhood obesity, the California start-up Revolution Foods is bringing tasty and nutritious school lunches to school districts that lack money to provide them.
Real estate mogul and creator of the Budget Suites of America chain, Robert Bigelow is working to develop similarly spartan accommodation in space. His inflatable hotels will launch by 2016.
Do charities exist simply to exist or do they exist to achieve something specific? Peter Thum says social entrepreneurship can address issues we once thought were impossible to tackle.
My brother Erik Nisbet, a professor at The Ohio State University, has a study out that casts important new light on how Americans reacted to the news of the death […]
In a previous post, we asked you who you want to see featured on video at Big Think. The response was overwhelming to say the least. From UAW President Bob […]
Long after the United States and the Soviet Union put their Cold War space race to bed, another cosmic competition is heating up. This one is taking place in the private sector.
Earlier this week I wrote a series of pieces (below, at Scientific American,Los Angeles Times) suggesting that society regulate (with lots of open and democratic discussion) the behavior of those […]
In a recently published book chapter, my colleague Lauren Feldman and I review the major areas of research on how media and campaigns influence public judgments and knowledge. We also […]
By 2012, world markets will be demanding 90 million barrels of oil a day. The world currently produces 88 million. Our dependence on OPEC oil and non-renewable energy sources is an increasingly bad idea.
A new study in the journal Carbon Management says architects should consider more wooden structures to reduce carbon emissions and create valuable carbon storehouses.
A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change with a new force of ‘green helmets’.
The theory of the multiverse may seem crazy, but cosmologits Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark explain why they think the theory is good science and how it can be tested.
The vast majority of Earth’s water is too salty for humans to drink and desalination has, until now, proven too inefficient to be practical. A German engineering company has a new solution.
His name was Dandon and he was a strange man even for 1812 Berlin. By day, he was a Professor of Languages at the University. He was competent and respected […]
The future of global innovation is the Brazilian favela, the Mumbai slum and the Nairobi shanty-town. At a time when countries across the world, from Latin America to Africa to […]
The vandalizing of Nicolas Poussin’s paintings The Adoration of the Golden Calf and Adoration of the Shepherds at the National Gallery of Art in London just this past weekend sent […]
Nanotechnology isn’t going away. In fact, it promises to impact so many industries that the word will become ubiquitous in our daily lives.
Who’s living the American Dream? A recent survey offers some interesting clues.
So Borders is gone for good, its last four hundred stores scheduled to vanish within weeks. As mourners rush to the liquidation sales, it’s worth pausing to ask: what the […]