In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, there’s a chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds” about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who discovered the four equations that govern electricity and […]
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A new kind of satellite measuring just four inches on each side could help NASA find nearby planets similar to ours as well as examine asteroids for deposits of rich mineral resources.
What hasn’t been said about Louis C.K.? The New York Times called him a “comedic Quentin Tarantino.” Writing for the Los Angeles Book Review Adam Wilson said he was “television’s […]
There has been a lot of noise recently surronding the prospects of virtual reality. With Google Glasses being showcased last month at the Google I/O conference, it seems – at the least […]
I recently helped a friend prioritize their measurement framework for a series of growth experiments. Here’s a lightly edited version of my advice. When looking to focus on user growth, […]
What’s the Big Idea? At some point in our lives, most of us realize that we can no longer store our cash in a piggy bank or under the mattress – […]
By linking a single ion with a single proton, physicists at the University of Innsbruck have established the first quantum interface between quantum processors and optical information channels.
The Department of Defense and researchers have collected and compiled the data on combat trauma and suicide. On Memorial Day people remember soldiers that paid the price for freedom, yet less than ten percent died on the battlefield.
What evolution and computer science have taught us is that comprehension is not required for competence. Similarly, the human mind may not be so mysterious as is often thought.
The idea of forgery resonates more than ever today in a culture in which “the open exchange of ideas has been rebranded as piracy.”
A team of Danish researchers are working to help villagers in eastern Namibia preserve their cultural traditions, which are becoming more difficult to pass down in an age of urban migration.
If there’s any artist who ever lived and knew color in his soul, it was Vincent Van Gogh. Almost mad with color, Van Gogh owned a box of different-colored yarn […]
The freewheeling, rabble-rousing Internet hacktivist collective known as Anonymous thus far has played little or no role in determining the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election. With the exception of partnering […]
Judging by what I’ve beenreadingonline, BBcreams, an all-in-one treatment/moisturizer/makeup/sunscreen mashup that first gained popularity among Korean actresses and starlets and is now used by almost every other gal in North […]
What is this thing called love? I took my own stab at understanding the neurobiological circuits underlying love and sex with my own book, DIRTY MINDS: HOW OUR BRAINS INFLUENCE […]
In his blog post yesterday, Big Think’s own Adam Lee called into question the editorial standard that would have us introduce evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa as our newest blogger. Kanazawa […]
Shakespeare’s Caius Martius Coriolanus isn’t really suited to politics, but his family and friends urge him on, and so he makes a game effort at putting up with the smelly […]
They remember her in colloquia and symposia, they remember her in the journals. They don’t remember her in the streets, her haunts. Reading her great novel Nightwood, Jeannette Winterson has said, “is […]
By the time he put the finishing touches on the Rite of Spring in November of 1912 in the Châtelard Hotel in Clarens, Switzerland, Stravinsky had spent three years studying Russian pagan […]
There’s no such thing as universality in art, says Stephen Greenblatt. We always create and read from the perspective of our own time and place. What then accounts for the curious power some works have to communicate with us directly across the centuries?
In 2011, I wrote “Pro-Family Christians Support Child Kidnapping“, one of the more despicable stories of how the religious right despises and mistreats GLBT people (and that’s really saying something). […]
There is so much going on in the economy, and much of what economists put out there about it is pretty depressing news. Three of the phrases that economists will continue to throw around—although scary—are ones everyone should be familiar with and know what they mean.
It’s France, 1785. An Englishman offers a surgeon money to perform a pretty standard operation: leg amputation. However, for the surgeon, there is no good medical reason to do so, […]
The Department of Defense is handing down two telescopes it built for spying purposes. By retrofitting the hardware, NASA will be able to look for dark energy at the edges of the Universe.
What’s the Big Idea? The Internet has a terrible habit of misquoting Einstein on energy and creativity until he sounds like he’s the author of The Secret, not the theory […]
In Part I, I introduced the idea that we should employ the principle of charity when engaging with ideas (particularly online) – especially from new and unknown interlocutors. Many problems […]
One unforgettable day in New York City, over ten years ago, I was crossing Park Avenue on my way to give a lecture when a Yellow Cab that had decided […]
Dear readers, Book Think debuted one year ago this month, and I’m in the mood to commemorate. Since it’s too hot for books, thinking, or even turning pages absently while […]
To keep power use down, tomorrow’s microchips will rely on light beams to transfer data rather than electricity. That’s good for the US, which still has an advantage in chip manufacturing.
NASA engineer Adam Steltzner is driving his team to attempt the seemingly impossible.