Big Think was saddened by the news that one of our experts, former Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, passed away on Sunday from complications of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Big Think had the opportunity to interview […]
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Recently two brothers named Chaplin created the smallest book in the world. Their tiny tome, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, is etched on a microchip narrower than the width of a […]
Socialfish founder Maddie Grant argues that social media represents a paradigm shift not only in popular culture, but in the fundamental relationship between businesses and consumers, and, as a result, in organizational best practice.
From an evolutionary standpoint, which traits are most adaptive to a historical moment in which old certainties have vanished and anything is possible? According to Seely Brown, they include bravery, creativity, and a sense of play.
Dear Readers, I made a mistake. In the article below, I said it would take some very high rates of growth to close the $7 trillion gap in Mitt Romney’s […]
DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner […]
As kids, my siblings and I would flip through old family albums and marvel over old pictures of family members in their youth. More than just thicker hair and thinner […]
In a country where print news is still a viable industry, a newspaper targeted at 7-to-11-year-olds is the first of its kind to be launched by an established publisher.
It was an independent republic for over 1000 years. Today, partially due to resentment of Italy’s central government, activists want to create a new “Repubblica Veneta.”
As shown by this map, the next presidential election will not be decided by 50 states, but by just 11 – the so-called ‘swing states’, that could still go either way.
While guilt is often considered the residue of religious moral codes, people who feel guilty about bad behavior before they even act may make the best friends, mates and employees.
Allowing your mind to drift can help you arrive at creative solutions to vexing problems, reveal what your true priorities are and help you find the peace and quiet needed to learn.
Before reading please click ‘View Entire Story’. My apologies for the length. Over at the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan wrote an article against abortion. It’s not entirely clear whether Hasan […]
A new book of philosophy, which attempts to reconcile the storied history of psychoanalysis with current neurological research, may have important implications for clinical treatments.
Researchers have found no evidence that we experience Mondays as far worse than other days of the week, yet we persist in believing Mondays are bad due to the nature of the brain.
I’m putting up a post tomorrow about writing and the creative process, but on this crisp fall morning, I’ve been thinking more about the social aspect of the profession. Although […]
A pair of Canadian researchers have arrived at a new understanding of boredom by examining what the word means to different disciplines. Our age may be the most bored yet.
One year ago I wrote about Facebook becoming the new resume, and this week we got some fresh data from Kaplan to verify the trend. This year over a quarter […]
The pace of urbanization and the development of megacities is causing an untold public health crisis, say international health agencies who study development and pollution.
In her new romantic comedy, 2 Days in New York, musician, actress, and screenwriter Julie Delpy proclaims, “You know why I don’t believe in the soul? Because the soul would […]
This year’s prizes in medicine and chemistry celebrate advancements in genetics that could revolutionize stem cell treatment and create pharmaceutical drugs with far fewer side effects.
New ways of understanding how tumor cells communicate with each other may yield fresh results in cancer research, according to findings recently released from Johns Hopkins University.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have used tracking data from personal mobile phones to map transmission patterns of malaria, enabling more effective prevention schemes.
Senator Bernie Sanders believes that creating massive cash rewards for drug companies will spur the innovation necessary to make new drugs and bring down the cost of prescriptions.
It’s never a good strategy in life to simply wait for good things happen to you. That is particularly true in politics, or any other enterprise that requires building a complex organization.
Companies need to be social to be successful. This is a key insight in Maddie Grant’s book Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, which argues that the principles underlying social media’s growth can be applied to the way we lead and manage organizations.
On a warm spring night in Paris, May 29, 1913, a riot broke out in the Champs Elysee Theatre during the premier of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” As […]
Researchers at Ohio State University say that the more educated you are, the more likely it is that you are piling up extra debt, and not just when it comes to student loans. This belies the notion that uneducated/undereducated people bear blame for the financial crisis.
A new study says that more colleges are dramatically redefining themselves away from the liberal arts model, with potentially dire consequences for higher education overall.
Stepped-up security measures at airports have decreased the number of terrorist-related deaths during air travel, but there’s a gap in similar security for people traveling on the ground that should be taken more seriously.