Earlier this week I caught a post on Lindsay Beyerstein’s blog Duly Noted, highlighting a horrifying NYT story wrestling with the question of whether children can be psychopaths, and if […]
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Sex. What a compelling topic! As a spiritual teacher, whether I’m giving a lecture or leading a retreat, whenever the subject comes up, a very particular form of focused attention […]
MSNBC’s Morning Joe is one of the few places on cable news where you can find genuine ideological cross-talk. It’s not surprising then that the program hosted this week University […]
Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier argues that free technologies like Facebook come with a hidden and heavy cost – the livelihoods of their consumers.
If current research proves fruitful, the homes and cities of the future may be powered by viruses. Berkeley Lab scientists have genetically engineered the M13 virus to output more power.
As more American cities warm to the idea of bicycle sharing programs, the bike may evolve into the ideal platform for gathering urban data on everything from traffic levels to heartbeat rates.
Class of 2012, you’ve heard it before: you will graduate into a world transformed by the global financial crisis. Unemployment among young people is at its highest rate since WWII, […]
Access to mobile computing, to allow employees to check email outside of working hours, increases productivity up to a point. After that it just burns people out and makes them unhappy.
Just around the corner from my desk something strange is happening. Miles and miles of hair is being teased into place, bucket loads of make-up are being applied and delicate […]
As his ear continues to be bent by assorted British Government officials, spooks and former Ministers determined that he introduce further restrictions over disclosure of information in ‘sensitive’ court cases […]
The presiding philosophy of the Laboratory for Perception is ultimately more informed by the possibilities of the future than by the past. Eagleman is fascinated by the idea that we could import the technology into human biology to enhance our sensory perception of the world, broadening and deepening our reality.
Take some standard tools for graphing data. Add the power of three-dimensional printing. Result: Data rendered not as a graph or chart, but as an object. A new frontier in […]
The United States of America murdered an innocent man. But this is not the main reason we should be against capital punishment. Carlos DeLuna was put to death in 1989 […]
“Too much experience…may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”
A new robotic sailboat aims to set navigation records while collecting data on marine life. In the future, such boats could be used for search and rescue operations and tsunami detection.
Are human beings’ needs and desires evolving faster than start-up companies can respond to them?
Believe it or not, this post continues with my theme of Cartesian America. As I explained, the Cartesian/Lockean American understands science basically to be technology. Its point is to make […]
Anxiety Creates Extra Tasks – And Problems Have you ever had one of those ‘super-productive’ days where you burn through all of your tasks and then feel… strangely hollow? This […]
A team of researchers at Brown University have taught a paralyzed woman to move a robotic arm with her mind, enabling her to take an independent sip of coffee for the first time in 15 years.
“Facebook is worth $100 billion, but all I got was this lousy status update.” That just about sums up the type of public sentiment that has been inundating the Internet […]
Blunt head trauma and traumatic brain injuries are well-known artifacts of war. The Brain Trauma Foundation reports that between 10-20% of Iraq veterans (approximately 150,000-300,000 individuals) suffer from some level […]
It was as though a spontaneous performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream broke out next to us on the sidewalk. My husband and I were on our way home […]
Strictly speaking, a “psychopundit” is William Saletan’s term for a scholar who uses psychology to explain what’s wrong with people who don’t vote for Democrats or recycle or otherwise agree […]
What’s the big idea?There is no shortage of online tools to help us research restaurants, track up-to-the-minute news and even plan out our zombie escape routes, yet there are very […]
Get this: there is a startup called I Dream of Space that is selling posters for $10 that also come with the chance to win a trip to space. In […]
Big Think hit the streets (the intersection of Wall & Broad, NYC) during the AM rush hour this Friday, May 18th with a guerilla theater piece for Facebook IPO day. […]
There is not much middle ground in the debate over whether life exists beyond planet Earth. Astronomers either believe the odds of life are impossibly rare or mundanely common.
What’s the Big Idea? Up up down down left right left right B A start. Press these buttons in succession while playing any one of the more than 60 video games […]
In 2005, Thomas Friedman elegantly pieced together the global frontier for readers in The World is Flat. A book that will go down in history as one that was right […]
Mining the moon for natural resources is inevitable, says engineering professor Dr. Leonhard Bernold. He has created a system that avoids potentially crippling efficiency problems.