New research indicates that New World ants, who fastidiously cultivate crops in their underground lairs for food, have updated the crops they grow over time.
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“Modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions,” writes Robert Paarlberg. But “the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers.”
Norman Steel and Benjamin Miller think New York’s garbage should be processed in waste-to-energy plants which produce energy, and are less polluting than landfills.
With yet another journalist attacked and killed in Honduras this past week, the country has become one of the most dangerous for reporters in 2010. As previously mentioned on this […]
With exactly 40 Earth Days in its wake, the US has come a long way on conservation awareness. But when we think about Earth and all that ails her, we’re […]
This FIFA World Cup ad looks like a psychedelic collaboration between Adbusters and James Nachtwey. Way to bum out the entire species, FIFA. Photo credit: flickr user Dr. Motte, licensed […]
“For centuries in the past we’ve been in the center of the world.In fact, you know, ‘China’ in Chinese means ‘the middle kingdom,’ that we are in the middle of […]
Here then is the hidden truth that none of the established political parties will tell the electorate in this, the penultimate week in what is fast proving to be one […]
When literary critics like Lionel Trilling wrote in the 1950s and ’60s, they wrote for “a readership of people who believed that your taste in literature or your taste in […]
I used to have a joke I told all the time, back when the mortgage business was booming, about the “loan officer’s tool kit.” If I saw someone standing in […]
“Maybe it’s time to admit that we may never find a way to reconcile consumers who want free entertainment with creators who want to get paid,” writes Megan McArdle.
Neil Simon “does not think against society; he thinks with it, observing and recording the sorrows and deliriums of the middle class, like a sort of swami of tsuris,” writes John Lahr.
Stanley Fish is not surprised that the Supreme Court struck down a statute criminalizing the production and sale of “crush videos” depicting animal cruelty for sexual fetishists.
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini argue that new genetic discoveries reveal a flaw in Darwin’s fundamental argument of evolution by natural selection.
Eliot Spitzer wonders whether investment banks do anything that helps America anymore—and, as such, whether these banks deserved the government bailouts they received.
The Internet hasn’t brought the global peace, love, and liberty that many believed it had promised. “A networked world is not inherently a more just world,” writes Evgeny Morozov.
Researchers have discovered that mammals may have the biochemical machinery to produce their own morphine.
Wine grapes are extraordinarily temperature-sensitive, and as global warming intensifies the “premium-wine-grape production area [in the United States] … could decline by up to 81 percent.”
Genetic scientists are discovering hundreds of genes involved in human disorders by looking at the DNA of distantly-related species.
Two new studies suggest that chimpanzees face death in human-like ways, from holding deathbed vigils to comforting the dying.
People who are motivated by rewards tend to be the ones who win at games—even when the reward has been removed.
For much of the past century, the realm of alien conspiracy theories has been inhabited primarily by academics and recluses, both widely dismissed as crackpots. Despite the billions of dollars […]
“The Goldman Emails,” exchanges between executives regarding the state of the market—and Goldman’s strategic choices leading up to and during this last crisis—are artful in their absence of art. These […]
“It’s obvious to anybody that the mind does much more than solve problems,” Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says in his Big Think interview. “But in a more fundamental way, […]
This Thursday, April 29, Big Think will be interviewing Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr., a.k.a. Perez Hilton, in Los Angeles—and we’re giving you, Big Think readers, the chance to contribute questions […]
“The need for Americans to enter the arena has never been greater,” write Bob and Elizabeth Dole. They write in favor of Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of “robust citizenship.”
Researchers have discovered a deep-ocean current carrying frigid water rapidly northward from Antarctica along the edge of a giant underwater plateau. They call it a climate change “fast lane.”
A new biography of writer Irène Némirovsky, author of “Suite Française,” rejects the idea that the Jewish author, eventually killed by the Nazis, was anti-Semitic.
Hoarders have “a sense of intense responsibility for objects and an unwillingness to waste them,” says Randy Frost. They also have an ability to find beauty in things that other people might not appreciate.
Scientists have gotten a better understanding of the molecular mechanism by which humans sense temperature. The findings could lead to new therapies for acute or chronic pain.