In 2018, the space program is scheduled to launch a probe that will get closer to the sun than any craft before it, measuring data in the star’s outer corona where temperatures are hellish.
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Photonic chips, which use lightbeams to do computering instead of electrons, have advanced greatly in recent years. Now rearchers at MIT want to put them in your personal devices.
What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like? Do we load our guns of conformity, light the canons of outrage, and march on?
A subtle but undeniable shift has been taking place in American corporate management theory. Roughly, the change corresponds to psychology’s shift from punishment & reward focused Skinnerian behavioralism to a focus on human relationships and development.
Using a unique telescope at New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory, astronomers are taking detailed digital photos, half a trillion pixels each, to make a 3D map of our amazing Universe.
“Who is it?” is often as big a question for art historians as “Who done it?” The mysterious model of many a famous painting—perhaps none so mysterious as the Girl […]
A Conversation with William Irwin Thompson by Michael Garfield William Irwin Thompson is a poet, philosopher, cultural historian, former MIT professor, and founder of the Lindisfarne Association – a transdisciplinary think-tank […]
2012 is shaping up to be the year of the solar storm. In late January, the largest solar storm in years erupted, sending a cloud of particles streaming from the Sun toward […]
In addition to in-house R&D, big businesses like Best Buy and Blue Cross Blue Shield are funding start ups to create new product lines and innovate the direction of the company.
During my last trip to San Francisco, I reported on my discovery of a woman who receives messages from God in his actual handwriting. I’m amused to report that I’ve […]
“My earliest memory is of anxiety!” cartoonist Daniel Clowes tells an interviewer in The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, the first serious monograph of the work of this seriously […]
On this blog, I often write about so-called controversial topics, which test people’s moral convictions: If you agree about abortion, you should agree about infanticide; there are no good reasons […]
The subconscious has an uncanny processing power which translates data into feeling rather than syllogistic chains. In many cases, emotion succeeds where rationality does not.
We have devoted a fair amount of attention on Big Think to the ongoing saga of Apple’s relationship with its Taiwanese-owned electronics supplier Foxconn. Why do we care about this story […]
A new surgical robot—developed by the army for use on battlefields—is light and relatively cheap. It also uses open-source software so it can be adapted to different medical uses.
Phoney-baloney outrage. Black-hat, white-hat exaggeration. Every day, I get emails some activist organization or other, suggesting that the nation hangs by a thread, about to drop into a bottomless pit […]
Italy, says Italian Historian Joseph Luzzi, is a chiaroscuro nation – a land of sharp contrasts.
Editor’s Note: Please welcome Korey Peters, who’s written a guest post about an atheist organization he’s founded that he’s calling the Calgary Secular Church. In this post, he’ll explain what […]
When author Nathan Englander visited Big Think, I had one major question for him, which I asked in about six different ways. How, I wondered, do you dare to embark […]
The same cultural zeitgeist that gave us the metrosexual – the urban male obsessive about grooming and personal appearance – is also creating its digital equivalent: the datasexual. The datasexual […]
In my early days of blogging, I would have exhaustive debates, sometimes lasting for weeks, with believers who came across one of my websites and posed a challenge to me. […]
What’s the Big Idea? Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne […]
If President Obama is re-elected in the Fall, he is likely to face a Congress even more polarized than today, with the ideological divide greater than at anytime since before […]
Just when you think you’ve gotten away from the so-called “grandmother cell,” it comes around again. It’s the proverbial Whack-A-Mole in the neuroscience world. No matter how many times the […]
If you took the three-question quiz I posted last week, chances are you answered some items incorrectly. Like some of my smart, accomplished friends and family members who took the […]
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued […]
Engineers at MIT have discovered a new way of gathering depth information that could be used to create 3D cameras requiring only the modest processing power of a smartphone.
With Stephen Colbert on vacation this week, Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona seems to have jumped into the role of the laughable conservative who makes ridiculous arguments with a straight face — or, in this case, who tries to make worthwhile political science research sound ridiculous.
When it comes to being the world’s most digitally innovative nation, the U.S. now trails Romania, which has become the first nation to accept the “Every European Digital” challenge from […]
What is the Big Idea? Tacked on to the end of the lengthy Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed new government safeguards after the U.S. financial crisis, there is an unusual provision […]