Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables is invaluable to us today, says Lisa New, because it presents a particularly “clear-eyed and realistic tale of an economy in transition.”
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It’s no secret that promotion rates in most industries have slowed during the extended recession. The good news, at least in the United States, is that with the current glimmers of economic […]
The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will shortly begin to recreate conditions that existed just instants after the big bang.
The ‘hydrogen economy’ requires a lot of things, but first is an easy and cheap supply of hydrogen. A Penn State professor thinks he has found a way to access that supply.
The paleolithic diet movement is starting to take hold in Europe, as the first restaurant serving food fit for a caveman opened in Berlin. The restaurant, a former brothel called […]
Is the West presently severely disadvantaged with regard to Asia, if not in relative decline?
Above all else, Kahneman’s legacy will be a precise, empirical reminder of our own fallibility, and a roadmap of the cognitive traps to which we’re most vulnerable.
I just can’t help myself. It’s remarkable how little I care about the outcome of the Koch-Cato standoff. Yet, having spent about half my professional life in politics at heavily […]
With 70 percent of Japanese now saying they want to phase out atomic energy, legislators have passed a bill to subsidize wind and solar power.
You listen in on a conversation among your conservative friends. “You know what I HATE,” says Rick. “I hate the government telling me what to do. I hate them […]
Safety regulations have lagged in the relatively new industry of renewable energy. From solar panels to wind turbines, workers can be put in harms way if precautions aren’t taken.
Yesterday marked the day when Earth went into ecological debt, having already used a year’s worth of productivity and resources. It has been dubbed ‘Earth Overshoot Day’.
A Belgian company is working on mining landfills to remove raw materials and make energy and building materials out of them, and then redevelop the land.
I’ve been having a high old time the last couple of weeks watching both Republican presidential candidates and TV political pundits squirm whenever the phrase “9-9-9” is uttered. Nevertheless, Herman […]
A new study has deepened the mystery of dark matter, that evasive substance that keeps entire galaxies together. The standard cosmological model may be wrong as a result.
I’m back! As you may know, I’ve spent the last three days in Springfield, Missouri, having a blast at Skepticon IV. The convention was a weekend of great talks that […]
Experts and dreamers gathered recently to discuss the possibility of sending humans far into deep space, possibly to Alpha Centauri, the star nearest our own Sun.
Singularity University has spawned a group of start-ups with the ambitious goal of impacting one billion people in ten years. Big Think contributor Michael Raymond del Castillo profiles this group of entrepreneurs who are looking to change the world.
Investments in renewable energy have been booming, but the government subsidies that have made renewable energy an attractive investment are bankrupting national budgets.
Two decades after the concept of ‘sustainability’ shifted from a financial to an environmental association, corporations are seeing the business case for focusing on the environment.
{EAV:e47b9f8ac33e6b9b}Last summer I was invited to President Obama’s Twitter Townhall at the White House along with 139 other characters. Despite the grandiose setting and President Obama opening the event with […]
As a general rule, I’m a fan of changing human behavior by changing the rules we live by. Given how inconsistent people are, it seems to me foolish to rely […]
If managed intelligently, efforts like Mark Tercek’s with the Nature Conservancy may succeed in funding ambitious environmental projects that would otherwise remain on the drafting table, and transforming the way industry understands its relationship with the Earth.
The man who changed the world: Apple founder Steve Jobs dies weeks after quitting as boss of firm he started in his garage. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg praises his “mentor and friend.”
Retailers and their suppliers are about to see real and lasting change to the size of their businesses. Not necessarily in sales but in physical size. The future is small […]
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is drawing to a close, and with it the brave and caffeine-addled efforts of over 200,000 writers worldwide. Unabashedly privileging “enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking […]
It’s not just the Mediterranean tier of countries – Tunisia, Libya, Egypt – that are experiencing stirrings of new life across Africa. Throughout the African continent, formerly moribund nations like […]
Einstein released many theories during his scientific career, but it was the publishing of his two theories of relativity that literally shook the foundations of physics. The theories proposed by […]
Stress. It is probably one of the biggest risks we face. The more worried you are that you might get sick, the more likely it is that you will, […]
A New York start up has engineered self-recharging batteries by placing small metal sheets on cell interiors which use the vibrations of the natural environment to generate electricity.