Private company Space X successfully launched its unmanned Falcon 9 rocket into space early Tuesday morning from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Worldcrunch provided some fun facts […]

China has one billion mobile phone customers and in the next 12 months, 200 million people will purchase smartphones. That's a big market for app developers, who also want better copyright protections. 

          Strange name for a movement, isn’t it; “The Right to Die”?  Isn’t that like asking the government for “The Right to Live” or “The Right to Eat” […]

A pioneer of neurotheology, Dr. Andrew Newberg uses fMRI and other neuroscientific tools to study religious experiences in the brain. He has the rare distinction of having studied Franciscan nuns and Tibetan monks […]

What is the Big Idea? During his presidential campaign, François Hollande voiced his support for gay marriage and adoption for LGBT couples. He said he'd pursue the issue in 2013 if […]

New technology platforms and lingering job shortages mean volunteering will be increasingly motivated by self-interest. So is it still volunteering? Or should we not worry about defining it?

This interview was originally broadcast live on bigthink.com on May 3, 2012. Newberg is a pioneer in the neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual experiences, or neurotheology. Here he discusses […]

Are the financial markets rational?  It's a tough claim to make as share prices and bond yields zoom up and down during a single day, hour, or even second, sometimes […]

Andrew Cohen says narcissism is a culturally conditioned epidemic. How is it harmful and how can we break out of it?

Here's a quite engaging and very sensible interview with Bennett Foddy on the possibilities for and the ethics of life extension.  I would put this philosophy professor in the moderately […]

“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 […]

Remember the 1960s? It was a decade so radical that even the President of the United States could publically declare that public funding of contraceptives would increase economic prosperity. Lyndon […]

While he does not do drugs himself, Penn Jillette also does not believe other people should go to jail for "victimless crimes," pointing out that 1 in 6 people in prison in the U.S. today are "in there for weed."

Big-idea start ups are not dead, says GigaOm's Derrick Harris. They've just moved to the cloud, where scalable technology allows companies--and individuals--to innovate like never before. 

I’ve always suspected, to paraphrase an adage from evolutionary science, that the marriage replicates the wedding. The wedding’s style is a germinal expression of the marriage to come, its strengths, […]

The preservation of individuals' online profiles after their physical death extends their life in a very meaningful sense, says Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes. 

A quiet suburban street set in the leafy suburbs of Cheadle, Manchester, Northern England on Monday, witnessed a coming together of a former Leader of Manchester City Council, Labour MP Graham Stringer […]

A new tech start up wants to use a mobile app to create a worldwide network for real-time language translation. Its creators say the system is the next-best thing to the singularity. 

Congress is apparently now speaking at a 10th grade level. The Sunlight Foundation recentlyanalyzed the Congressional Record and found that the average member of Congress speaks at 10.6 grade reading level on the […]

The first thing that came to mind when I finished Predator Nation, the book by Charles Ferguson that explains how Wall Street’s elite brazenly commit financial crimes out in the […]