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While psychologists have cornered the market on what it means to be happy, other fields are slowly examining metrics that might give us a new perspective on the age-old pursuit.
I've often written about the moral system I advocate, which I've dubbed universal utilitarianism. Although people have a broad range of individual preferences, human nature is, in general, fixed and […]
Like many others, I was not very enthusiastic about the launch event of the iPhone 4S. The expectations where simply too high, and the whole event seemed to lack the […]
Evidence shows that heavy alcohol use modifies the structure and physiology of the brain, although the extent of recovery after years of abstinence is remains uncertain.
Ever wonder why some people seem completely spaced out? It turns out half the normal population has a fold in the brain that makes their memories significantly less accurate.
Metaphor is extremely powerful: By washing, people can remove a sense of immorality, unlucky feelings or doubt about a decision, say University of Michigan psychologists.
Given the increasingly complacently atheistic tone of many of the BIG THINKERS, I thought I'd introduce some realism about our Constitution's silence on God. My position will be, of course, somewhere […]
Education isn't magic. It is the wisdom wrung from failure. People learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. But why do some people learn faster than others?
What should be done to Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial crisis? This question has lingered for some time, without much action being taken by Washington, until eventually […]
Having concluded that screening does not save lives, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will recommend that healthy men forgo being screened with the familiar PSA blood test.
A small but growing vanguard of people, mostly with rare diseases and cancers, have come to better understand their condition through sequencing their families' genome.
At this year's F8, Mark Zuckerberg's keynote was opened by Andy Samberg doing a 5 minute impersonation of Zuck (or, as Samberg began calling his character, "The Zuck Dawg"). Turns out […]
Earlier this week, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism flagged a disturbing finding from a September survey of U.S. households. The survey, which was conducted by a consortium of financial planning […]
So, we've had a couple of days to settle in and kick the tires, and my move to Big Think is now complete. As I said I'd do earlier, www.daylightatheism.org […]
Like other local and state governments, Topeka, Kansas is in the grips of a dismal budget crisis. So this week, Topeka’s City Council did something desperate. They debated decriminalizing domestic […]
The human papillomavirus (HPV) causes more instances of throat cancer in men than smoking, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
When researching medical treatments online, Web users have to be discerning and think like consumers, not patients, to avoid scams and commercially motivated advice.
Ageing and death are not something human beings generally look forward to but biologists say that immortality could prove a disadvantage to the survival of our species.
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Penn Jillette answers Big Thinker Adam Lee's question about how he reconciles two world views: his atheism with his libertarianism.
The author Sam Harris was, to my knowledge, the first of the New Atheists to make a novel and important observation about the way religious privilege operates in our society. […]