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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
A world in which great minds thought alike would be a dystopia.
The scientific mindset, Steven Pinker argues, is "indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality."
What's the Big Idea? The words “learning” and “education” are unsexy in print – probably because for most people they unconsciously conjure up feelings of Dickensian dread and boredom. This […]
Water is among the natural resources—including oil, fish, timber, and minerals—that face increasing demand as a result of population increases and economic growth.
Looking over the summer blockbuster movies I see that “The Lone Ranger” flopped. The western, that iconic American genre, seems to be on the wane. Post-modern treatments, or westerns with […]
The country is the world's largest polluter, but it is cleaning up faster than anyone else.
Some unconvincing reasons not to philosophize.
At Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky challenges the common assumption that automation is the cause of long-term unemployment.
Judah Folkman, the cancer researcher, is probably the most – one of the two or three most inspiring human beings I've ever met. I only spent two or three hours […]
Winston Churchill's career reveals that he was pretty consistently wrong on issue after issue, place after place, time after time, and he was wrong for the same reasons he was right in May of 1940.
What would a great ad for a university of technology be? An ad, that itself, solves a problem through technology. This is exactly what the University of Engineering and Technology of […]
According to NASA estimates, up to 60 meteors per hour might be seen at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower on August 12.
The strongest determiners of depression, according to online search patterns, appear to be employment rates and climate patterns.
A survey of 240 young men and women has found that adult human crime victims receive less sympathy than do adult dogs, puppies, and human children.
In a new article published in the Journal of Consumer Research, professor Rik Pieters explains why shopping can make us lonely and why, once lonely, we turn to shopping to relieve our anti-social symptoms.
Science, along with evolutionary theory, may soothe the human soul in ways similar to religion by promoting a vision of the universe that is not random and chaotic but rather orderly and deterministic.
In a recent study of elderly people with poor blood flow, researchers found that drinking two cups of hot chocolate each day improved the seniors' circulation, resulting in more blood flow to the brain.
By measuring the level of acetone gas in the breath, users of a new breathalyzer can tell if they are getting a good workout, helping to incentivize exercise and aid individuals in managing their diet.
MIT doctoral student Kuang Xu has created a mathematical formula that can reduce the amount of time injured people wait for medical attention in the emergency room by ten percent.
Using stem cells extracted from two separate cows, researchers in Germany have created the world's first synthetic beef. The stringy protein was grown in laboratory conditions.