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The transcript of the interview I did last week at NPR’s On the Media is now available. In the interview, I restate exactly what we argued first at Science and […]

“By prompting President Obama to suspend deep-water drilling in US offshore waters, the Gulf oil spill is pushing up the date at which the world’s conventional oil production peaks,” says the CSM.

“The nature and depth of the financial crisis is forcing us to reconsider some of the basic tenets of financial theory,” says Paul Volcker who maps his ideas for reform in The NY Review of Books.

Michael Grunwald wrote in Time yesterday that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill might not be as disastrous as we thought. It’s not that it hasn’t had some serious consequences, obviously. […]

American politicians and lawmakers are deeply conflicted about human enhancement technologies (medical interventions that extend the capabilities of the human body). Stem cell research doesn’t qualify as enhancement; rather it is […]

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?

“In fact, it is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. Some say that the only thing that quantum theory has […]

Newspapers–and their localized science and environmental coverage–might be in decline across the U.S., but new ethnic media outlets, many of them in languages other than English, are thriving. These outlets […]

A Gallup survey report released yesterday finds that a record 41% of Americans–and 66% of Republicans–now say that news reports of climate change are exaggerated. I first spotted this troubling […]

Kudos to the Obama administration for approaching one of America’s top science communicators for the position of Surgeon General. Not only could CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta be a visible and […]

Why is this couple smiling? Because Oprah might be the friend they need in order to win ultra tight elections.More than 8 million people watch Oprah’s show and more than […]

“When something is free, you tend to use more of it. It’s true for buffets and open bars, and it’s the same with carbon,” says The Atlantic while advocating for a carbon tax to slow global warming.

Imagine that the Journal ofHypochondriacal Cardiology reported that the incidence of fatal strokes aboard cruise ships was five times the national average.  Should we conclude that the boat trips were […]

Bernhard Zand explains why a “frustrated Ankara is turning away from the West and looking east toward Hamas and Iran.”

From restarting the economy to dealing with climate change, society’s biggest questions turn on how they are defined by advocates and the news media and acted upon by the public […]

We all think we know what it means to be conscious, but it is hard to pin this down in a precise, scientific way—as USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains in our video. Every weekday in September, Big Think will offer a new insight into the human brain in our new “Going Mental” blog.

As a first step, the government needs to put a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Fossil fuel needs to pay the price for the damage it causes in the atmosphere.

Energy producers who met with skyrocketing food prices and international protests while using food crops to create large quantities of biofuels are now eyeing inedible waste.

At NewYorkTimes.com, Alex Kaplun of Greenwire reports on emails exchanged among several prominent climate scientists regarding possible plans to fight back against the “neo-McCarthyism” of political leaders such as James […]

Why is it so important to provide the wider American public with readily available and scientifically accurate “frames” that re-package complex issues in ways that make them personally meaningful and […]

A conversation with the director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Will futuristic energy solutions such as fusion and biofuels ever live up to the hype surrounding them?

Has the rise of celebrity architects over the past couple of decades been good or bad for the design of buildings, generally? New Yorker architecture critic Paul Golberger says that […]

Few people have felt the muzzle of an automatic machine gun in their gut, let alone survived a kidnapping on their birthday. In January 1998, then-federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was […]

Mark Levine of UC Irvine laments Obama’s pragmatic path where his empty promises to change America’s foreign and energy policies mark the way.

After the Copenhagen Climate Council was considered a failure, how should we prepare for COP-16 in Mexico? Big Think’s live roundtable on March 26, 2010 in Houston was moderated by […]

Wind is becoming a more viable (if still controversial) energy source, but effective solar power may have to wait until the nanotechnology boom.

By all officials estimates, the Earth’s population is scheduled to grow rapidly during the coming decades, but this long-term problem ill-suits short term political careers, says The Independent.

Not merely a nice flower, but also a political tool

If most maps are like meat and potatoes, these are like fruit and dessert