People see what their tools let them see. Case in point: How different the world looks when it’s mapped according to unfamiliar principles. Even more striking than a reverse-pole map […]
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It’s startling to think that a six-foot one-inch, 230-pound football star can be undone by 140 little characters, but that’s exactly what happened to Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry […]
An anti-toxin that protects people against ricin poisoning is about to go into production for the first time.
Senior executives at Blackwater Worldwide bribed Iraqi officials with around $1m to silence them after civilian deaths.
Chinese state media have reported chaos in Beijing after scientists artificially induced the region’s second fake snow storm.
A prominent professor punched a female university employee in the face during an argument about race relations.
Staff at a New Zealand aquarium were astonished to find baby sharks spilling from a wound in a female school shark’s stomach after she was bitten by another shark.rn
Former astronaut Lisa Nowak pleaded guilty to burglary and misdemeanor battery in an attack against a love rival.
Brazil’s major cities were plunged into darkness last night after a large scale power outage.
The hottest toy to hit the shops this Christmas looks like a cross between a hamster and a Furby.
Brooklyn band Vampire Weekend has disappointed Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries by revealing that their new album “Contra” is named after a video game.
A group of NASA engineers have perfected a replicating machine that resembles something out of Star Trek.
There are only a few careers that can be launched over a campfire in a New Hampshire artist colony. Luckily for Jonathan Ames, storytelling is among them. Though–as the author, […]
Today, and over the next two days, Big Think will be posting a series of videos called “What Do Women Really Want?” Of course, there is not just one answer […]
It was a mystery: how does the chromosome replicate itself precisely during repeated cell divisions without degrading over time? Structures called telomeres (the “caps” on chromosome ends) seemed to provide […]
It’s unbelievable, really. The US military is holding up Iraq as a model for Afghanistan. They’ll tell you it took a few years to get right but by golly, Iraq […]
Google and copyright holders’ proposed digital library settlement has outraged its competitors.
A new film about a hopeless ghetto teen is actually fresh and interesting – not just "another brick in the wall for African Americans".
The appearance of an expensive mosque in impoverished and predominantly Catholic Nicaragua has got the rumour mill turning.
A deer was fatally injured after it jumped into the lion’s den at the National Zoo.
The US government is suing a defense contractor for allegedly substituting sophisticated warhead ignition devices for unsafe equivalents.
Some claim the light hearted tone of new film “The Men who Stare at Goats” belies the steely complexity of the real-life figure the central character is based on.
Defense contractor KBR has been accused of exposing 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancerous toxins in Iraq.
A gene thought to be responsible for causing deafness in the elderly has been discovered by scientists – and the discovery could prove cure.
A tongue in cheek look at an alternative universe – "what if Germany hadn’t won the War?"
An agent for a covert secret society has been accused of “torturing” a French aristocratic family for whom he was acting as a guru.
What just passed through the House of Representatives? Will it help relieve the century-long constipation that has plagued American health care reform? In a conversation with Big Think today, Yale […]
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I’m here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip — […]
Because government troops in Guinea massacred civilian protesters at about the same time as I started blogging for Big Think, I’ve committed myself to using this space to track events […]
One word haunts Seymour Hersh’s new investigative piece about the potentially shaky security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal: “mutiny.” As Hersh writes, “the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or […]