The Latest from Big Think

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America's National Ignition Facility has set a new record for the amount of energy generated by lasers. The experiment will be used to work toward creating laboratory-controlled fusion. 
If we are interested in testing the physical limitations of human biology through sport, we should create a second Olympics which allows the use of performance enhancing drugs.
Human-run institutions have had a spectacularly poor track record at monitoring the activity of the world's largest banks, so companies are turning to artificial intelligence instead. 
In his superb essay about his years as a Mormon (one of the best pieces about faith I have read in a long time) Walter Kirn notes that he said […]
Cheers for STEM. But what about the, um, rest of the fabulous, life changing, extraordinary and often more important teachers who don't teach math, engineering, technology or science?
The new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayeris pregnant, and not planning on taking maternity leave. This has stirred renewed conversation about “having it all,” and women’s lives. I’ve written before in […]
She hardly needs my sympathy, but I feel sad for Marissa Mayer. It seems so unfair that the two most amazing things that may ever happen to her (having a […]
It is true, of course, that exceptional can just mean strikingly different—an exception to the rule.
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Ever wondered what you were thinking after making a bad decision? Daniel Kahneman explains.
A commitment to space exploration satisfies our curiosity and need to explore new lands, it provides innovation and new jobs to the economy, and it will help our species escape this rock. 
Delivering a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, the American geneticist spoke on how modern science has changed the parameters of life and how we are close to creating synthetic life. 
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The hiring and managing of employees is the achilles heel of many an otherwise tightly-run organization. Why? Because human beings come with many more variables than do widgets – we’re […]
The hiring and managing of employees is the achilles heel of many an otherwise tightly-run organization. Why? Because human beings come with many more variables than do widgets – we’re trickier to assess, our motivations are complex, and we change over time. 
The Guardian reports that some English schools are opting out of HPV vaccination programmes because their pupils, say the schools, “follow strict Christian principles” and “do not practise sex outside […]
Yahoo wants to have it all. The company's board has tasked new CEO Marissa Mayer with the mandate to compete with her former company, the cash register that is known […]
Hello readers. I've been on vacation for the last several days. Here's an old post from my previous blog WhyWeReason.com to fill the void. It's about a paper by the NYU […]
Performance art and film art have always been the afterthoughts of museums—the new kids on the block with no room of their own in the big culture houses. Institutions designed […]
NASA is working with Lockheed Martin to design a diet for astronauts on their way to Mars. Food is such an essential part of the journey that one astronaut may be dedicated to meal preparations.
A nonprofit dedicated to researching the science and technology needed to travel vast distances across the cosmos says lasers can be used to harvest antimatter from the vacuum of space.