A new study out of Finland has found that having a boy may shorten mothers’ lifespans for biological and environmental reasons. Researchers will now look for more current data.
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By studying how viruses work in plants, biologists are coming to see that far more species are symbiotic than purely independent. In other words, viruses can confer benefits on plants.
Full citizenship is the idea in which all members of society see themselves as change agents.
In yet another nod to its country’s aging population, Japan’s Fujitsu presented at this week’s Mobile World Congress conference a prototype of a cane containing 21st-century technology.
Software company Opower teams with utilities to provide customers with reports showing how well they’re doing compared to their neighbors. These and other small nudges have worked to reduce costs as well as environmental impacts.
The second-largest desert city also has exceptionally high levels of humidity, which the billboard converts into water that citizens can access via a simple spigot.
In a new study at the journal BMC Medical Ethics, my colleague Declan Fahy and I analyze the journalistic and critical reception of Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 best-selling book The Immortal Life of […]
This brings me to an ancient Greek, the master himself, Socrates of Athens. In a segment of Gorgias that foresees decades of modern psychological research, the erudite interlocutor observes that […]
The project is designed to make recycling as simple as possible by taking the sorting process out of the hands of residents and putting it into those of various companies.
Peter Gabriel and Vint Cerf are two of the people behind the proposed Interspecies Internet, a platform that is exactly what it sounds like.
Before the end of the Second World War, officials from the Allied nations met up at a resort town in New Hampshire to create a new economic order for the […]
1. “First the pope and now Andrew Mason!?!” Andrew Mason continued the popular Silicon Valley “I’ve just been fired” meme with a blunt note to employees at Groupon: “After four and a […]
A little over a year ago, I wrote aboutThe Herb Block Foundation’s gloom and doom report titled The Golden Age for Editorial Cartoonists at the Nation’s Newspapers is Over. Founded […]
Here’s a published dialogue that I did with my friend Deepak Chopra in which we discuss the challenges of standing up for Spirit in a secular culture. Enjoy! __________________________________ ANDREW […]
Do we think it is possible for kids to learn to read on their own? A dispatch from a big bold idea in progress.
In a column this week at Time magazine, Michael Grunwald says he’s on the side of activists who oppose the XL Tar Sands pipeline and chides the “respectable centrist pundits” […]
I had to plumb memories of a SchoolHouse Rock video this morning to sort out exactly what was so out of place at the Supreme Court during Wednesday morning’s oral […]
The underlying rules of 3D printing that help innovators get past key cost, time and complexity barriers.
The camera inside the BallCam compensates for the speed at which the ball rotates to provide a clear, wide-angle, “ball’s-eye” view.
Available for sale later this year, the Myo interprets muscle movements in the forearm and transmits them wirelessly to software-enabled devices that can understand them as commands.
MIT scientists have created a way to amplify ordinary video to reveal normally imperceptible movements, such as the pulse of blood underneath the skin. Applications range from patient monitoring to equipment surveillance to lie detection.
A team of researchers has developed a prototype battery that can stretch up to three times its size and can be recharged wirelessly.
This goes way beyond sell-by dates: Scientists have developed a plastic converter that could pave the way towards the creation of food packaging with monitoring sensors.
Rising inequality means—among other things—that low-income people are pushed further into poverty, and this makes it harder for them to earn their way out.
Here’s the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. I know I’m annoying many BIG THINK readers. I may even be bad for their health; […]
I have a friend who suffers from chronic pain. She has tried meditation, acupuncture, opioids, yoga and all manner of other remedies. Chances are, if anyone, anywhere, has said something […]
A new paper suggests that it’s much easier to detect oxygen in the atmospheres of planets orbiting white dwarf stars, which are dimmer than the Sun.
By 2017, over half of the almost-1,200 islands comprising the country of Maldives will come under guidelines set by two United Nations programs for preserving natural resources.
One reason, says the founder of the Inspiration Mars Foundation, is that participants are “going to need someone [they] can hug” given the length of the mission.
If we know that we are bad at predicting and can account for the underlying psychology then why do we continue to make bad predictions?