The level of education a mother has at the time she gives birth is an accurate predictor of her child’s academic success, especially in the areas of math and reading, according to a new study.
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A technology startup plans to market a smart phone accessory that will allow you to zap your brain with an electrical current, helping you feel energized or relaxed, depending on your needs.
What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then this is what Africa might have looked like.
We all want to be happy. Some have even said that achieving happiness is the goal of life. But we wouldn’t look to a technology company for such wisdom, would we?
For more than six years, Clara Boj and Diego Diaz have been developing a solution that enables kids to simultaneously enjoy the physical and virtual worlds of play. Their invention, HYBRIDPLAY, turns playground objects into game controllers and teaches kids how to work collaboratively.
According to a new study, people want to be interested in brain science – but don’t act on that desire – or don’t get the chance.
It’s the faintest and hardest object to see in the entire catalogue, but the rewards — and knowledge you gain — are priceless! “If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the […]
Facebook is addicting — this idea is nothing new. But take away the numbers and suddenly the site becomes much less appealing.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
The ability to talk is an important asset for people in business, but there’s an invaluable amount of information your could learn about your clients if you just listen.
How to Reverse Aging Enzymes like Telomerase and Resveratrol, though not the Fountain of Youth unto themselves, offer tantalizing clues to how we might someday soon unravel the aging process. […]
The NFL’s success hosting regular season games at Wembley may spur the league into expanding full-time across the Atlantic.
Anyone who has seen James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator remembers “seeing” through the eyes of the killer android sent into the past as it scans its surroundings for clothes, weapons, and, eventually, its target. German filmmaker Harun Farocki would later call those pictures “operational images”—the machine-made and machine-used pictures of the world that threatened to supplant not just how people see, but people period.
Staying up late and waking up late may seem to be popular trends among teens everywhere, but there’s biology to back up this sleep cycle as a norm that school gets in the way of.
If you’re not routinely keeping your brain fit through physical and mental exercise, you’re putting yourself at risk for an early descent into Age Related Cognitive Decline (ARCD). Do your brain a favor and feed it what it likes.
Working with someone you don’t like doesn’t have to be a toxic situation. Try focusing on the person’s positive aspects when trying to bridge gaps between you.
Bad days, break-ups, or stress-filled meetings may have you craving some comfort food to ease your anxiety. But don’t reach for that chocolate bar just yet.
A hybrid potato that can reduce food waste and eliminate a suspected carcinogen in cooked potato products would seem to be an environmentalist’s dream. But the hybrid was created using biotechnology to blend potato genes from different varieties, so opponents of genetically modified food are fighting to keep this potentially beneficial product from ever reaching consumers.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheryl WuDunn recently visited Big Think to discuss her new book, A Path Appears.
By scaling its already formidable storage and computational capacities, Google plans to store individuals’ genomes in the cloud so they can be analyzed en masse by healthcare researchers.
A new scientific study out of Germany confirms that growing genetically modified crops is good for national economies as well as farmers’ wallets, allowing more crops to be grown on less land.
Telling your friend how a TV show, movie, or piece of live theatre ends may incur his or her wrath, so determined are we to preserve the element of surprise.
Predictions that the global population would level off later this century may prove false, reviving a debate about how to grow national economies while protecting environmental resources.
A writer makes a connection between the wild world of Twitter and the sociological principles of hypercriticism, which stipulates that negative statements are inherently assumed to be more intelligent than positive ones.
Environmental Strategist Andrew Winston visited Big Think this week to discuss how the business world can play a major role in dealing with climate change.
“Often what people call sustainability… the things that fall under that that are environmental or social challenges – there’s this assumption in business that trying to tackle these issues will be expensive… There’s a sense that green was somehow not good for business. It wasn’t out of nowhere but that’s really a dated view. We now have a situation where the challenges are so vast and the world is changing so fundamentally that the only path we have forward is to manage these issues.”
Combining alcoholic drinks with caffeine causes people to drink more for a variety of reasons, say psychological researchers from several American universities.
Wouldn’t it be more fair if being elected to a federal office required a majority rather than plurality of votes? Perhaps it’s time to replace our current voting system with a ranked ballot.
Despite all those early quarrels, research suggests that having a sibling greatly improves your behavioral development and quality of life.
The age of consumerism is a well known notion nowadays, and it breeds the idea that we have more freedom in choosing what we want and how to spend our […]
If you’ve got a friend or family member who practices medicine, asking them for advice can feel like an easy alternative to visiting a doctor. But sometimes those requests for help cross a line that doctors aren’t keen to approach.