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While some inventions will remain forever confined to the pages of science fiction novels, much of what we’ve dreamed up in books – warp drive, star gates, portals through space and time – will one day make the leap in to living rooms everywhere.

The fact that the rabies virus can spread from an infected neuron to other neurons connected to it makes it an almost perfect vector for tracing connections in the brain.

The author Sam Harris was, to my knowledge, the first of the New Atheists to make a novel and important observation about the way religious privilege operates in our society. […]

The latest brain-computer interfaces give people control over their real-world environment: opening and closing doors, controlling the TV, lights, thermostat and intercom, etc. 

In his book Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins opens with an arresting analogy: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going […]

This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership […]

The same basic impulses – insatiable curiosity, good people skills, an appetite for risk – that led Kevin Mitnick into a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse with the FBI are richly rewarded in more prosocial professions.

French philosopher Raphaël Enthoven meditates on the nature of reverie. Rather than firing neurons, daydreaming is ‘a sweet drug that plays with fire’ and ‘the world before concepts’.

When you think of Burberry, do you think of prim and proper English models wearing plaid coats or do you think of beautiful exotic scantily clad holographic models walking on […]

I gave the case for some kind of kidney markets in my last post.  The limited commodification of that particular part of the body is the only way, for now, for […]

This essay was previously published on AlterNet. In a campaign speech in September, Rick Perry hit upon some familiar Republican themes: Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, in an appeal to […]

Welcome, all, to the new Daylight Atheism! I’m pleased to be officially joining Big Think as a blogger-in-residence. Whether you’ve just come across this site or are a long-time reader […]

         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 […]

The rollout of technology allowing cell phones to be used as credit cards has been so slow that a superior technology is catching up. Biometrics promises a truly wallet-free future. 

Being a chameleon is good only if your colors are changing in the right direction.

So obviously the division of human inquiry into the sciences and the humanities is ridiculous.  Reality, after all, is one. The opinion of scientists tends to be that they’re all […]

Combining top-down and bottom-up approaches, a new low-cost method could enable the creation of three-dimensional nanostructured materials that serve a variety of functions.

Here’s a strange story: Erica Herrera plans to marry Curtis Allgier, even though he’s an incarcerated alleged murderer with white supremacist tattoos all over his face and she’s not white. […]

There may be renewed interest in whether we can sense the Earth’s magnetic field after a finding that a light-sensitive protein in our eyes can act as a “compass” in a fly’s eye.

Had Piers Morgan stuck with the celebrity thing, I suspect that the hacking storm would have touched him, but not engulfed him. Celebrity twitter is what Morgan knows, and it […]

A new photovoltaic energy-conversion system with many practical applications developed at M.I.T. can be powered solely by heat, generating electricity with no sunlight at all.

When I searched earlier this month for exhibitions related to the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I quickly realized that I had bitten off more than I could […]

The genetic mutation that drives evolution is random. But here’s a list of some beneficial mutations that are known to exist in human beings

My recent post on the godlessness of the Constitution has attracted some attention. Over the weekend, I came across a reply from another of Big Think’s bloggers: Peter Lawler, a […]

Monday I posted on the reasons for the fall of Borders, reasons that go much deeper and broader than simply blaming Amazon.  But how are the most treasured of urban […]

Poverty means making more trade-offs and resisting more temptations due to limited resources—depleting the very willpower people might have used to lift themselves out of it.

Current C.E.O. of the British manufacturing firm Umeco, Andrew Moss believes his country can remain a relevant producer of high-tech goods in a range of contemporary industries.

Any American who has steeled him or herself to watch the fur fly in the latest political fray over the debt ceiling knows that civil discourse is anything but civil. […]

Joe Therrien, an OWS activist and semi-employed drama teacher, has become infamous since the Nation included him in an article on “The Audacity of Occupy Wall Street,” which began like […]

Is it better to burn out, as Neil Youngsang, than to fade away? When it came to the drama of the Abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock burned out like a supernova […]