The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that a distant planet discovered in 2009 is largely composed of water. Its physical attributes could mean an exotic mix of elements are present.
Search Results
You searched for: light
Scientists at UCLA have found that running a mild electric current through the brain’s hippocampus improves memory function. The finding could contribute to Alzheimer’s research.
Cash and coins account for only three percent of the Swedish economy, about half that of the US and Britain. Some predict that cash will disappear from Sweden in as little as 20 years.
–Guest post by Declan Fahy, AoE’s Science and Culture correspondent. Can popular science writing help diagnose a medical condition? It did for me. Since I was a teenager I had […]
A group of scientists have laid out an ambitious plan to tackle one of the grand challenges facing mankind in the early 21st century–develop a supercomputer that can simulate the brain.
Every status update, every tweet, every pin is a micro-jolt delivered squarely to the pleasure centers of our brains.
Children whose parents were responsive at 18 months of age show more extended and imaginative play at four years, while children whose parents were directive spend more time in the immature pattern of merely touching or looking at toys.
Sometimes there can be a gap between identifying what you naturally gravitate toward and how that translates into your full-time work. Here are three steps to help you bridge that gap.
“Too much experience…may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.”
Matt Yglesias replies to an argument from Mike Konczal: Mike Konczal has a fairly compelling argument that it would make sense to dismantle the entire crazy quilt of “submerged state” […]
Back in January, I wrote about Jessica Ahlquist’s court victory over an illegal “School Prayer” banner in her high school in Cranston, Rhode Island. That was almost the end of […]
Antonin Scalia died February 13, 2016, a day before Valentine’s Day. The conservative darling defended your right to abstain from broccoli and from health insurance, but he won’t stand up for your right to pleasure yourself.
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.
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.
I’ve never understood those weight guessing games offered at your more low-rent carnivals. Yet, across the country, people hand over their hard-earned dollars, driven by a curiosity about whether their […]
I do not want everyone to have the same opinion I have on, basically, anything: from gay marriage to drugs.
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.
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.
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
“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 […]
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.
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 […]