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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
Yesterday my boss asked me a question out of the blue. “Didn’t you used to sell stocks?” “A long time ago,” I said. And with that, he began to tell […]
This sums up everything that needs to be said about the "populist" Tea Party. It's not populist and its values of are antithetical to those of the Boston Tea Party. […]
Tax cuts are in the eye of the beholder. The House voted today 234 to 188 to extend the Bush tax cuts for people earning less than $250,000 a year. […]
There hasn't been a lot of coverage in the news, but Ethiopia's Erta'Ale has started issuing new lava flows over the last week. I got a note from an Eruptions […]
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A conversation with the CEO of Gay Men's Health Crisis.
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After three or four odors are blended together, even the best noses in the world have a difficult time distinguishing one original scent from another.
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"There are some things that simply disgust us in a very, very instinctive, deep kind of way. And there are other things that we clearly learn to find either good […]
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The cause of the so-called "Proustian experience" of recalling a vivid memory through taste is well documented, but its cause continues to confound scientists.
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What’s remarkable about the olfactory system is that from the outside world to the highest level of brain tissue there are only two synapses.
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Our olfactory system’s methods of molecular recognition provide a model for understanding all kinds of other receptors in our bodies.
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Olfaction may be both the most primitive and the most sophisticated of our five senses.
2010 marks the first year that the U.S. will have a national strategy and implementation plan for combatting HIV/AIDS domestically.
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A step-by-step explanation of how flavor makes it from our mouths to our brains, as well as a "shocking" interactive experiment for you to try at home.
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Taste refers to our five sensitivities — sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami — while flavor is a "hedonic" sense involving smell, texture, and expectation.
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A conversation with the chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences.
While online tools for personal finance management like Mint and Outright make it increasingly easier to keep track of our "digital money," there's something to be said for the dwindling […]
It’s human nature to try to understand something new by comparing it to something we already know. We always interpret the present based on past experience. But when we make […]
The special bond that often forms between people and both domesticated and wild animals maybe be, paradoxically, part of what makes us human, says Dave Munger.
The United States clearly is like other countries in some respects and unlike them in other respects. Exceptionalism thus isn't of much use as an analytic construct.
Good metaphors are expansive; they compare something we don’t understand, to something we do. You see in a new light both the object of interest and the substrate you rest it on.