How are large groups of animals capable of astonishingly coordinated behavior? Do human crowds behave according to similar logic? This week Princeton evolutionary biologist Iain Couzin, a specialist in self-organized pattern […]
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One of my first subversive art experiences was watching Terry Gilliam’s animated collage title sequences for Monty Python. The Pythons loved to poke fun at the vestiges of stuffy Victorian […]
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator was shut down after a bird dropped some bread in it.
The angels, cherubs and putti depicted in Christmas nativity scenes are “anatomically flawed” according to a scientist who claims they would never be able to fly with their flimsy wings.
From Artificial Car Noise to Zombie-Attack Science, the New York Times Magazine lists the year’s most interesting innovations and ideas from A to Z.
The brown pelican has been removed from the endangered species list after a century of special protection.
New research reveals that birds use light rather than magnetic fields to aide their migration.
The world’s focus right now is on immediate aid to Haiti, as it should be. But it never hurts to look down the road, too: when the repercussions of Haiti’s […]
The Large Hadron Collider has suddenly burst into life and started smashing proton beams together for the first time.
The underwhelming results of the Copenhagen Accord during last month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Denmark sent me searching my mental files for examples of how art has documented […]
If you want to speculate about an alternate-universe world without intelligent primates (and who doesn’t?), then your thoughts must turn to the octopus. Because the octopus has a large and […]
A massively magnified sea bird made a surprise appearance on Melbourne’s Channel Nine news.
Canadian Turkeys are the latest to be infected by the Swine Flu pandemic.
Technological change captures attention in every era, exciting dreams (and nightmares) about the future, filling histories and literature with stories about its powerful effects. The newest and most impressive devices […]
Is it possible that the world’s most famous diarist wasn’t keeping a diary at all? According to author and literary critic Francine Prose, Anne Frank’s famous account of life in […]
The numbers that came out yesterday were downright alarming: up to 90,000 people could die from the swine flu this fall, and 1.8 million people could be hospitalized. So says […]
Wall Street has a new gimmick. Buy a life insurance policy below face value and hope the policy holder dies sooner rather than later. “The sooner the policy holder dies, the bigger the return,” says The New York Times. Will that sentenced be prominently placed in the promotional material? I doubt it.
As we’ve blogged before on Big Think, the state of science savvy in America is pretty sorry. Only about a third of us accept evolution through natural selection, even lower […]
As a website devoted to providing an interactive, online forum with global thought leaders, you can imagine our dismay when we read Nicholas Kristof’s evisceration of “experts” in today’s New […]
The environmentalist’s horror image of an oil spill is usually the affliction to wildlife—birds and fish coated in black crude, struggling to move or to breathe. But a study by […]
The first book Weisman ever bought was Audubon’s Guide to the Eastern Bird.
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Gerry Adams the songs of a caged bird.
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