bigthinkeditor

With a Rhodes scholarship and Ph.D. in political science from Oxford, Rachel Maddow may be the brainiest TV news host yet to defend opinion-based journalism.

Are the modern media damaging domestic life? Current studies demonstrate a more complicated picture of a modern family that changes modern media itself.

Google’s next Android-powered phone will contain a chip enabling people to make payments via their handsets. The technology is safer than conventional credit cards.

Religious Americans give a higher percentage of their income to charities and are about 25 percent more likely than secularists to give in the first place. But why?

Why can’t you tell when an hour has passed without looking at a watch? Neuroscientists explain why our biological clocks are subjective and susceptible to influence.

A Scottish man in his 60s has become the world’s first person to receive injections of foetal stem cells into the brain in order to repair damaged nerve tissue caused by stroke.

State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our “selves” through narrative. In other words, we are our narratives.

Today’s top chefs are dedicating their culinary brain power to cashing in on the burger craze. The secret to good taste is high fat content, says The Wall Street Journal.

Exceptions to the trend of scientific progress include research on infectious diseases, space colonization, supersonic transit and commercial fusion power.

As networks of people grow larger, they will usually tend to converge on an accurate understanding of information distributed among them, says a new M.I.T. study.

In his memoirs, Mark Twain criticized counterinsurgency tactics used by the U.S. during the Philippine-American war and called the foreign engagement a ‘quagmire’.

‘Surrender to the Terrorists, Then Strangle the Economy with Taxes’ is the tongue-in-cheek name for a serious plan to create a budget surplus in the U.S. by 2015.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way

Children as young as 3 are less likely to help a person after they have seen them harm someone else. This consciousness of other’s intentions is earlier than previously believed.rn

Talk of bribing lawyers, proximity to the mafia and sex scandals with teenagers have yet to dislodge Silvio Berlusconi. So how can Italy get rid of him, asks Tobias Jones.

If we want evolution to be accepted by everyone, we may need an approach with a bit of everything. Quinn O’Neill on persuasion via aesthetics, not just evidence and appeals to reason.

The man who coined the term ‘net neutrality’ (Columbia law professor Tim Wu) now says that Apple is the company that most endangers the freedom of the Internet.

The effects of fishing are certainly not as extreme as the celestial impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs, but in some parts of the tropics we are getting close.

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

Here is the dirty secret of anomalous phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance: They’ve been demonstrated dozens of times, often by reputable scientists.

Men are ‘hardwired’ to cheat, ignore their wives, suspect infidelity, overspend, fail, love money, pursue women and achieve supremacy in the workplace. Or is that bad science?

In the last two months, dozens of anti-piracy groups, copyright lawyers and pro-copyright outfits have been targeted by a group of Anonymous Internet ‘vigilantes’.

In the future, we may manufacture the products that we used to buy at the store right in our very own homes. We may also find ourselves buying products that […]

Our society is faced with a disturbing reality: One in eight people aged 65 and older has Alzheimer’s—a disease that currently has no cure.  Annual costs associated with the disease […]

They were fast, loud and furious—and when things got out of hand the police sent in the snipers. The Guardian pays tribute to America’s west coast punks.

Car companies are turning to a powerful and cheap source of advertising: young social-media influencers who have strong online followings.

Why are countries clashing over the relative values of their currencies? Peter Dizikes at the MIT News Office examines the ideas behind a competitive money market.

Americans use language to cover the sleeper, not to wake him, Baldwin said, which was why the writer as artist is so important. Only the artist could reveal society.

The mystery of why some people stay effortlessly thin while others struggle to keep weight off has come closer to being solved with a study isolating a gene that affects appetite.

Does a dirty scoundrel need a bath or a moral lesson? Our brains easily confuse metaphor for reality, often with dangerous consequences, says Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky.