Welcome to a new feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week […]
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Question: What do VCRs, Betamax players, condom use in Thailand, and hybrid corn seeds in Iowa have in common? Answer: The adoption of these innovations each followed a logical, predictable […]
An evolutionary biologist named Jaroslav Flegr argues that many house cats carry organisms that invade our brains, leading to mental disorders like schizophrenia as well as causing suicides and car crashes.
It’s no secret that Americans spend too much. So what can they learn from China, a country where households save over a third of its income for a rainy day?
It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis.
Dean Kamen’s Slingshot is “a prophylactic disguised as a drinking fountain,” write Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler in a new book.
I saw a tweet yesterday—“How Obama Could Have Killed Bin Laden Harder”—that cracked me up. Intrigued, I clicked on the hashtag #CPACpanels and saw several people who populate my Twitter […]
The American myth of the lone innovator, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, no longer fits the complexity of technological progress or the interconnectedness of communication systems.
Laura Deming, a 17 year-old undergraduate, was paid $100,000 by a California venture capitalist to leave her university. The offer is part of a bold business/education experiment.
Anne Carson writes books that refuse to be just one thing. Autobiography of Red is a verse novel framed as a work of classical scholarship; fittingly, its hero is a […]
Amidst growing public perception that Facebook is using us to make billions of dollars using data we’re freely posting online, there is another sinking suspicion: Web startups we don’t keep […]
The story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son on Mount Moriah is one of the formative myths of Western monotheism. And most theists of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions […]
“If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it would never dawn on you to say, ‘Well, now, this thing needs free will!’ What are you talking about?” says Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience.
Whether the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland finds the Higgs boson depends on scientists’ abilities to interpret extremely complex data sets correctly. Here’s how they do it.
So I’ve gotten too many enthusiastic and too many critical emails about my recent “Liberal Education” post for the wrong reasons. It was critical, of course, with the general approach […]
The space agency’s Biosciences Division has created a medical tool for astronauts that stands to benefit millions of Earth-bound patients by improving a wide range of treatments.
Bernard Savage, Head of the EU Delegation to Sri Lanka and the Maldives said: “At this stage, given our information, we would not say that there has been any legal […]
A pair of Nobel laureates have created a multi-layer transistor made of graphene. The new design succeeds where past models failed, begging the question: Will graphene replace silicon chips?
Rumors and, according to 9to5Google, even evidence is surfacing that Google is testing out a new physical product on its campus, Google Glasses. 9to5Google already wrote about this project back […]
Until the good bishops of the Catholic church can figure out how to keep their priests from molesting young boys, I have no use for their histrionics over the Obama […]
The self-driving car is a technology of degrees. Adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping features will be released first. But when will you be able to sit back and relax?
Wireless electricity transference has been underdevelopment for years and more powerful charging stations are about to hit the market. You’ll never have to plug your phone in again.
A Dutch woman has received a jaw implant created layer by layer from a 3D printer. The maker of the machine says human organs could one day be printed using organic ‘ink’.
Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney in all three Republican contests on Tuesday. Santorum won by sizable margins in both Missouri and Minnesota—where Romney came in third behind Ron Paul—although Missouri […]
Put these films in your Netflix queue and you will not only get a first-class education on the history of cinema, you will also get a window into the rich visual culture of the Renaissance.
For the first time in half a century, a new alternative energy source is making a big difference. Global wind energy can currently power six Britains but it comes at a cost some call colonialism.
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below […]
Now this is what I call post-romantic. It begins with a fascinating vanguard of “neuromarketing” researchers. These scientist-marketers hook up subjects (consumers) to new biometric technologies such as EEG headsets […]
If the statistics being produced by the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland are to be believed, there is a 99.996 percent chance that the elusive Higgs boson has been found.