Parag Khanna says that a choice made ten years ago—not by the State department but by American universities—could have the greatest influence on whether new Arab governments move toward or away from the West. 

Life code (the famous A, G, T, and C of DNA) will be as important to the next generation of entrepreneurs as digital code (0's and 1's) is now.

The question of using genetic enhancement to raise test scores may seem like a bad joke—or science fiction. But U.S. policymakers and families, may need to start asking themselves if they can "win the future" without it.

Over the last several decades, both through good economic times and bad, the United States has transformed into the planet's undisputed worry champion.

Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they will launch into a treatise about the Three Primary Colors: red, blue, and yellow. This would be wrong, says Jason Cohen.

A very smart statistician has realized that it is possible to sort, with upwards of 90 percent accuracy, the winning scratch tickets from the losing ones before anything is scratched off.

All Americans, not just those in senior governmental positions, could benefit from having the option to watch Al Jazeera English—or at least having the option not to watch it.

An "invisibility cloak" that's able to hide items thousands of times larger than before now exists, scientists say. The cloak works by wrapping light around an object.

Arguably, the U.S. now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in most countries, so enormous time and effort are devoted to finding loopholes.

The Google Art Project offers a new form of collaboration that allows museums to take extraordinary art works beyond their individual homes to create the first global art collection.

Nature is smart, efficient and innovative. That's why scientists and engineers all over the world try to copy it in their labs. The field concerned with imitating nature is called biomimetics.

Seven years before Charles Darwin went public with his evolutionary theories in On the Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer sketched out the basics of evolution and natural selection.

Two management consultants identify four guiding principles successful companies have followed to prepare for a world of constant Internet connectivity.

Four out of five autism sufferers are male. Are fundamental male-female brain differences causing the gap?

In a panel near the end of Farsight 2011, several panelists spoke about how the sheer quantity of information around us is affecting the way we think — and even how our brains are developing.

In a special presentation at Big Think’s Farsight 2011, Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and CTO of Russian search engine Yandex spoke about why his company has been dominant in that country’s […]

The fourth part of Big Think’s Farsight 2011 event discussed what future search experiences might be like. People instinctively want to interact with technology in ways that feel natural to […]

Facebook and other social media are becoming permanently woven into our society’s fabric, says NYU telecommunications professor Clay Shirky. Privacy is a 20th century notion.  

Part 5 of Big Think's Farsight 2011 event looked at how artificial intelligence and machine learning would affect the future of digital search — and how we understand and predict the future.

Any actions associated with zero costs tend to become debased over time, says technologist Jaron Lanier. Search is no different.