The Latest from Big Think

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My students looked a little funny this morning. Nails were brighter, curls were bouncier, rumples were sparser and a few young men even sported ties. Today was senior portrait day, […]
The FCC is considering a proposal that would allow "airborne calls and cellular data use by passengers once a flight reaches 10,000 feet," while maintaining restrictions during takeoff and landing.
Have we already reached peak car? This is the term that urban planners are using to describe the decline in vehicle miles traveled per person. 
We are so conditioned to relating to others in adversarial terms that we seldom think of how futile that is as an everyday code of conduct. 
      I just read an alarming piece on what the world will look like, possibly soon, when the efficacy of our current arsenal of antibiotics really starts to fade. There […]
An oyster reef costs about the same amount of money - $1 million per mile - as a seawall. But when you consider other factors outside of cost, the oyster reef wins by a mile.  
An oyster reef costs about the same amount of money - $1 million per mile - as a sea wall. So as an infrastructure investment, it's a tie. But when […]
When I say “visual communications,” you might think I’m referring to video conferencing, which has been around for a long time and is most often used by executives in large […]
For younger Americans, the President might very well be most vividly remembered for the way he died.
In 2014, voters in Switzerland will decide whether their country should send a monthly check for $2,800 to every Swiss citizen and legal resident. This idea may never fly in […]
The mission would have to take advantage of next alignment of Earth and Mars, which occurs in 2017. Miss that window and we'll have to wait another 15 years to take advantage of the orbital dynamics of the planets, which significantly reduce the distance and cost of the trip. 
While harkening back to our hunter-gather ancestors may be good nutrition, it’s not necessarily good thinking. 
Early humans lived in a world that one evolutionary geneticist compared to the fantasy world of Lord of the Rings. Not only were there many hominid populations, but these populations interbred, contributing to the genetic diversity of modern humans.
This image is an artist's illustration of the 4U1630-47 star system featuring powerful jets emanating from a black hole candidate that is just a few times the mass of our sun. So what type of matter is contained in these jets?  
Neuroscientist Christof Koch proposes that consciousness is to be found in complex systems all around us. Therefore a dog, or a smaller animal like an earthworm, or even the Internet, all possess consciousness. 
You need to make a decision about how much thought and anxiety you’re going to invest in an attempt to prolong your life, which may be thwarted by the normal contingencies of human history.  
This week we mark the loss half a century ago of President John F. Kennedy. For that generation, Kennedy’s death was the “where were you” moment. For our generation, the […]
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We know that the dark matter has to be pretty cold - moving so slowly that its motion hardly matters - and that allows us to predict in great detail […]
"Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." -Abraham Lincoln
What they’re able to identify by datafing text is that references to the one painter Marc Chagall, in the German language, went dark between 1933 and 1945.  He was Jewish.   The world leaves a trace.  And the trace is data.