In this selection from his Floating University lecture, Professor Steven Pinker deduces the nature of language acquisition by examining the generative use of grammar in children.

Steven Pinker is a cognitive psychologist interested in language as a window into the human mind. In this excerpt from his linguistics lecture for the Floating University, he illuminates some of the mysteries surrounding children’s hardwired ability to learn language.

My friend Jason Brennan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, offers a short and sweet argument against the death penalty: Even if we grant for the sake of argument that […]

Google's director of research, Alfred Spector, explains why artificial intelligence is crucial to the search company's future in areas like natural language, machine learning and speech recognition. 

Many believe that the next decade of technological innovations in the TV space will be defined by the possibilities of Internet-connected TV sets, such as tailored recommendations. 

An environmentally friendly car which gets 200 miles per gallon and was partly made using 3-D printing technology has gone on show in Canada. Commercial production may begin in 2014. 

The 'hydrogen economy' requires a lot of things, but first is an easy and cheap supply of hydrogen. A Penn State professor thinks he has found a way to access that supply. 

Following the lead of its competitors, Amazon announced today that its Kindle users can follow a simple process to check out e-books from 11,000 community libraries across the country. 

Here’s a question that doesn’t get asked often enough in the “death of print” debate. If print books are limping toward extinction, why do so many writers—even the youngest, Web-savviest […]

The state of Georgia just killed Troy Davis. Which is to say, a number of individual human beings acting under the imagined authority of the state of Georgia killed Troy […]

By the time the Persians destroyed the Roman military garrison at Dura-Europos in 256 AD, the city high above the Euphrates River existed for almost six centuries since its founding […]

Most of us have little idea what the fighting in Sanaa over the past several days has been like.  We can imagine if not quite comprehend the daily struggles that […]

At a time like this, when so many of us are dependent on the brave reporting of journalists in Yemen, it is fitting that the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression […]

            A friend of mine posted a snarky comment on Facebook about how foolish FEMA sounds, announcing it’s preparing for the crash landing of a satellite somewhere this week. Somewhere […]

So there's a lot of excitement about dolphins on BIG THINK these days.  If we can figure out how to communicate with them, we can figure out how to communicate […]

Since its peak in 2007, the U.S. economy has lost almost 7 million jobs. Although the economy has begun to recover, jobs have been slow to return. Recent job growth […]

Today the Washington Post has a story up about the constellation of secret drone bases the US is building in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa […]

The Spaceship Company, a joint-venture between Virgin Galactic and a California technology company, has opened the doors of a new facility to manufacture suborbital spaceships. 

Following up on her first book, renowned physicist Lisa Randall's newest work explores the cosmos, from the atoms being smashed at the L.H.C. to physicists' search for dark matter. 

Over the past couple of weeks practicallyeverymedia site has run a piece on a new “economic theory” that argues that gender equality is driving down the price of sex. Valid […]