Search Results

Just as the collective ruckus of science deniers hits its peak, Netflix announces a date for ‘Bill Nye Saves the World’, a heroic new show that will answer the most pressing science questions of our era. 

Astrobiologists took a novel view and used evolutionary processes as their guide.

They’re 3 billion light years away, but their collision can lead to answers to really big questions.

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Jace Clayton AKA DJ/Rupture on sleuthing for beauty and surprise in the digital-musical landscape. 

If your favorite theory made the list, you might want to consider a new favorite to bet on. “Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great […]

A Duke University study that found over 40 percent of our actions aren’t actually decisions, but habits. Here’s how to build good ones. 

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. On this week’s episode of Think Again – a Big Think podcast, James Gleick, author of Time Travel – a History, talks with host Jason Gots about why we’re so obsessed with something that’s evidently impossible. 

A.I. will bring a series of social and financial changes, and it will force us to confront a problem we’ve been avoiding for much too long, says Joscha Bach.

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. Fiction writer and environmentalist T.C. Boyle on the crazy, contested world we might not be able to inhabit much longer, and what we’ll do after that. 

Look who went and got himself a talk show. Big Think’s regular contributor Bill Nye will be on Netflix in 2017!

Spontaneous talk on surprise topics. The voluble Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on why tolerance is the wrong way to deal with terrorism, the refugee crisis, and all the other problems we face. 

Watch what it might look like to travel from the sun to Jupiter at the speed of light.

Right and wrong has never been so gray in the Star Trek Universe. Imagine you’re in a fight with an enemy, and the fight itself isn’t fair. You might have […]

A new study challenges what we understand about the workings of time.

Bottoms ups! A Southern Calfornia brewery is taking its beer from toilet to tap. San Diego’s Stone Brewing has started making Full Circle Pale Ale using treated sewage water and recently held a tasting. While Bill Gates has shown that drinking “poop water” is perfectly fine, will consumers chug down this beer?   

It’s a fascinating idea, but how does it fare as a scientific theory? “Something is happening here and this is going to have an impact.” –Robert Dijkgraaf, on Verlinde’s work The […]

A blacker-than-black coating reveals how our senses totally fail without input they understand.

Has Google become our modern confessional? Former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz discusses how Google knows you better than your friends and family–maybe even yourself. He is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. 

It happens every once in a great while: the ‘Kids’ come down from their lofty peak and tell the elders what they think is “cool.”

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. On this week’s episode of Think Again – a Big Think podcast, novelist Ian McEwan and host Jason Gots discuss Hamlet, moral quandaries, and how to set boundaries in a world that wants to pull you in every direction.

Greatest job ever? NASA will pay six-figures to a Planetary Protection Officer.

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. On this week’s episode of Think Again – a Big Think podcast, Nobel Laureate neuroscientist Eric Kandel and host Jason Gots discuss abstract art, memory, identity, and the nature of evil. 

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. Historian and New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb on interspecies ethics, the limits of civil discourse, and mathematical symmetry as the defining principle of the universe.   

“My theory is true, if I do say so myself.” SPOT stands for “Spontaneous Preference For Own Theories,” and it’s a newly identified cognitive bias.

Studies and trials point to the potential of a rave drug becoming the newest antidepressant medication in decades.

Stephen M. Walt, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, tackles some seemingly non-controversial statements about human rights, democracy, and international law.

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. Author Jodi Picoult and host Jason Gots talk comic books, social justice, and why white Americans need to take the risk (and the consequences) of talking honestly about race and class privilege. 

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. On this week’s episode of Think Again – a Big Think podcast, celebrity chef Alton Brown and host Jason Gots talk about fire, their mutual childhood lust for the Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven and how everything worth doing might get you killed. 

Sponsored by the Charles Koch Foundation

Spontaneous, deep talk on surprise topics. Author Margaret Atwood on genomes in the cloud, Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize, the elusiveness of dead authors, and why technology’s a three-edged sword.