Surprising Science

Nobel-prize winning biochemist Sir Paul Nurse comes to Big Think tomorrow to discuss cancer research and health care policy. Post your questions for the “David Beckham of science” here. Over […]

From the Department of Really Cool Gadgets comes a protoype for a mobile phone that will alert us to all the bad stuff out there. It can sense pollen counts, […]

Statistician extraordinaire Hans Rosling is back on the presentation circuit with data that suggests reorienting the debate over the success of AIDS prevention could be a wise next move. Unveiling […]

Rarely has a non-descript box beside your TV been the source of such heated division. While the DVR has provided great convenience for TV viewers unable to watch their favorite […]

Last week Amazon released their new electronic reader, the Kindle DX. With a larger screen and a price tag $130 more than its predecessor, the Kindle DX is positioned to […]

Human hearing picks up only a limited range of frequencies, and that range diminishes as we age and our ears deteriorate—just think of the high-frequency cellphone rings that high school […]

Twitter… Twitter.. Twitter. When I receive an email announcing that my dad in Florida is following me on twitter, I know something’s up. He has no Facebook account. It was […]

As soon as we even breathe the word “sex” here in the Big Think office, headlines hop off the Google newswire fast enough to make even a liberal blogger wince. […]

Nick Bilton, a designer, user interface specialist, technologist, journalist, hardware hacker, who is currently the design integration editor and user interface specialist at The New York Times and The Times […]

There are a few ways to think about storing your gametes at -321 F for later use. On the one hand, cryopreservation could be one of the greatest tools would-be […]

The flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and the layers are coming off. This could mean only one thing at Big Think: it’s time to consider sex and the […]

As if checking out satellite photos of your home’s rooftop weren’t enough fun, Google Earth expanded to the bottom of the the ocean, the surface of Mars, and, of course, […]

It has become fashionable to castigate Twitter – the microblogging service – as an expression of rampant narcissism. Yet, narcissists are verbose and they do not take kindly to limitations imposed on them by third parties.

Apologies for blurring thought and common sense here, but in case the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations were insufficient, we’ll add in some out-of-the-box thinking on staying healthy […]

With a name inspired by IBM and a cold and, dare we say, machine-like demeanor, 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL has become one of filmdom’s most enduring characters. But in […]

There isn’t any data supporting this fact, per se, but it is possible that images of Mario and Pac-Man are as instantly indelible as some of history’s most famous portraits, […]

The new brain sciences are upon us. There’s neuroeconomics to analyze how we make financial decisions. There’s neuromarketing to sell our brains stuff. There’s Ray Kurzweil to explain how our […]

Big Think’s latest livecast will feature Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram and Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain as they offer a look at the Wolfram Alpha, a soon-to-launch engine that […]

In a week that saw plenty of quarterly reports see the light of day, two in particular caught the eye of couch potatoes everywhere. Are televisions the latest casualties of […]

By now it is all over the place that Pirate Bay has lost its lawsuit with the authorities regarding their enablement of internet piracy. But this will neither ensure that […]

In addition to an increased risk of needing Lasik surgery and an unnatural LCD-like glow to your complexion, excessive time on Facebook may be keeping you from your family and […]

The so-called Instinct Diet attacks the two primary drivers of failure in dieting: deprivation and hunger. 

Stem cells are medicine’s next frontier. Stem cells are political thin ice. Stem cells mark our moral Armageddon. The positions on stem cell research are as various as the diseases […]

Like a great gravity-eating vortex, the world of “pull” is increasingly at our digitized fingertips with new ways to bring previously out-of-reach information into the realm of practical individualized use. […]

The free-for-all world of the blogosphere is set to get a Nielsen-style ratings system that could finally open a new age in classifying weblogs. But to get an understanding how […]

Finding a job, a date, used clothing, golden retriever, or pretty much anything else has been facilitated immensely by the online classifieds site Craigslist. But the ease with which users […]

It’s April 20th, known the world over as International Pot Smoking Day. If you’re reading this you’re probably not stoned. Although given the increasingly numerous reasons to be stoned, you […]

One outstanding task on the global conversation to-do list is how to communicate across languages on all our various new media. Now, a linguistic brain trust at MIT has stepped […]

Until some mad genetic engineer with a cache of tropical real estate makes Jurassic Park a reality, the details of the lives of dinosaurs beyond what fossils and fossilized footprints […]

All too familiar with the ravages of the late-90s tech bubble, tech companies are not playing the fool this time around. Though they are by no means seeing stellar profits–in […]