It’s often said that children are the designers of humanity’s future. International research consultancy Latitude and ReadWriteWeb decided to take the adage literally, asking children to envision the future of […]
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As we discussed in the previous Going Mental posts, some of the most fundamental mechanisms of the human brain remain a mystery to scientists. Consciousness, intelligence, and sleep are so […]
In a now famous skit from Saturday Night Live, William Shatner told a room full of Trekkies to “get a life.” Like Shatner, highbrows tend to dismiss fan culture as […]
Most people consider anonymous sex in public places to be a crude, rude and immoral act. But “all that is rude ought not to be civilized with death,” as Walter […]
If you’re not a computer programmer, the name Bjarne Stroustrup might not mean that much to you. The creator of the coding language C++ isn’t exactly a household name. But […]
Double blind peer-review in science and other fields has been the norm for decades. Now some scholars, as featured at the NY Times this week, are arguing that peer-review needs […]
I went to a wake earlier this week for the grandmother of a very close friend of mine. I had only seen his grandmother a few times in all the […]
Last week we talked about promiscuity and I gave you a chance to take a test to measure what psychologists call “sociosexuality”—which I referred to as promiscuity. When you took […]
A groundbreaking 1981 study that showed that it is not our physical state that limits us, but our mindset about our own limits, is set to feature in a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.
Facing a slow-motion food crisis the world should learn from Brazil, which reacted to its farm crisis with boldness, expanding production through science, not subsidies.
Mother Teresa, who would have turned 100 this week, helped spark a new missionary model which increasingly sees ordinary people volunteer while on vacation.
It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, writes Timothy Egan, but a culture of misinformation can have very serious consequences.
German city planners are hoping that applying “environmental psychology” will help make Hamburg’s huge new urban development a success.
The Telegraph says that after more than a decade of “virtually unfettered immigration”, the U.K. “is desperately overcrowded” and public concern is not xenophobia or racism.
Author David Rieff laments the rise of “fast thought” in books and decrease of works written in the spirit of scholarly investigation, not just to illustrate a thesis.
Retired intelligence officer Paul R. Pillar says the U.S. should try harder to curb the export of terrorists — particularly homegrown ones — and terrorism from its own territory.
More fast growth among global for-profit universities seems probable and the number of globally mobile students is likely to surge as higher education’s globalization continues.
Publishing houses are more relevant than ever in the digital era, says Ursula Mackenzie, chair of the U.K. Trade Publishers Council. And demand for print works remains very strong.
Near where I live in Berkeley, the country’s first four-year Muslim college just started its first semester. Zaytuna College, which for the time being is run out of the American […]
With brain scans, scientists have learned much about what happens in our heads during sleep, but they still can’t answer the simple question: why do we sleep?
I can’t say enough good things about Deborah Blum’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.” It’s an fast-paced narrative that mixes […]
Ever since she wrote a New York Sun article about why she let her 9-year old son ride the subway alone, journalist Lenore Skenazy has been lambasted by the media […]
Perhaps the most effective frame used by opponents of nuclear energy is that it is simply not “cost effective.” Not only is it wasteful, argue opponents, but government subsidies are […]
We of course have the two robot landers on the surface of Mars (Spirit and Opportunity). The Spirit Rover recently went into hibernation mode and is no longer communicating with […]
“Vision,” Stanford’s Bill Newsome likes to say, “does not happen in the eye. It happens in the brain.” As I mentioned in my last post, this is a general theme […]
Now that August, Big Think’s month of thinking dangerously, is over, we’d like you to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to 10 of the radical ideas we presented.
From Philip K. Dick to Stephen King, the film and TV industry not only adapt the creative narratives of authors but also lean heavily on their devoted fan base to […]
“How can economic modernization be combined with cultural robustness and social well-being?” Columbia Economics professor Jeffrey Sachs looks at Bhutan for clues to the answer.
“As far as scientists can tell, we humans seem to be the only species that shed tears for emotional reasons.” Is there an evolutionary advantage to being inspired to weep?
“If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, it turns out they were doing it in the 19th century—only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.”