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4mins
Bill Nye is an engineer by trade, so you know his answer to this one is going to be good. Learn how the rudder of a Boeing 747 can potentially inspire an inventor to develop a better brand of prosthetics.
But it doesn't have to be.
Words like "liberty" and "freedom" represent big ideas that are about as amorphous as they are valued.
Thanks, climate change.
Cepheids are the hottest, brightest variable stars of all. When they’re surrounded by gas, a spectacular light-echo can follow. “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; […]
The "extraordinary authority" of maps helped perpetuate an erroneous image of West Africa for almost an entire century.
The shooting of two charismatic animals stirred international outrage. But a more important event to the developing world concern with animal welfare was publication of Carl Safina's Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel.
The pictures of Stuart Palley tell a story that no words can. “the way to create art is to burn and destroyordinary concepts and to substitute themwith new truths that […]
Why do Vermeer’s paintings fascinate us so? Perhaps the reason lies behind a revolution in seeing in both art and science rooted in Vermeer’s 17th century Holland.
While we usually associate yoga with flexibility-inspired exercise, evidence shows a lack of psychedelic mushroom tea could lie at the foundation of this discipline.
2mins
Stereotypes have consequences, especially when they're reinforced by loudmouths like Donald Trump.
Will nanobots someday deposit Shakespeare directly into our brains? In this week's episode of Big Think's Think Again podcast, we're joined Buddhist-influenced psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein
3mins
Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki chats about testing out her current hypothesis.
5mins
Dr. Michael Lindsey of NYU's Silver School of Social Work shares his views on the state of mental health within the African-American community.
A new study says critical thinking is a teachable skill, but who is going to teach it?
There’s no such thing as absolute time, but after 13.8 billion years, is anything relatively different? “The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since […]
Research has shown that drugs dogs routinely act based on the behavioral cues of their handlers, rather than acting on their sense of smell, raising important questions about the Fourth Amendment rights of anyone subject to search based on their actions.
Late night has become uninteresting and often unfunny, but all of that may change with the help of Stephen Colbert.
Hayek viewed markets as distributed-intelligence systems that evolved to compute resource allocations. We can now update that view with ideas from computer science, biological signalling, and evolution.
Couldn't we just get all the nutrients we need from food?