Key moments and achievements from the modern environmental movement. 

What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America?

Before artificial light was bent to our will, most people would retire shortly after dusk, sleep for four or five hours, awaken for an hour or two, then drift back […]

Teddy Goff will be appearing on Big Think to discuss how the lessons of digital politics can be applied, albeit in smaller scale, to your life or your business.

From Newton to Einstein to quantum physicists today, Smolin writes, "I believe--as strongly as one can believe anything in science--that they're wrong."

1. Nicholas Thompson writes at The New Yorker: There’s something particularly devastating about an attack on a marathon. It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. […]

 

The British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has had his moments of doubt, about both himself and about the future of the human race.  Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, […]

The brain imaging technique "everyone's been waiting for" has arrived, and may speed up brain anatomy research "by 10 to 100 times."

1. Dark lightning Thunderstorms need to vent electrical energy, and they can do so in two ways. There is the Ben Franklin way and there is the extreme way: dark […]

1. The Topless Revolution Targets Putin  “Putin leered like Benny Hill at a topless protester,” was the headline on The Reliable Source. Gawker has the video of Putin giving the thumb’s up. […]

“Although we often stereotype givers as chumps and doormats, they turn out to be surprisingly successful.” So writes Adam Grant in his celebrated new book, Give and Take: A Revolutionary […]

1. Don’t Let Math Get in the Way of Big Ideas “Many of the most successful scientists in the world today are mathematically no more than semiliterate.” E.O. Wilson shares […]

1. Cover Your Ears. Here’s What the Big Band Sounded Like: BANG! That audio recreation was made by the University of Washington physicist John Cramer, who notes that the sound frequencies […]

The Universe is in a runaway mode, but here is the catch: we don't know how long that runaway mode is going to last.

1. Living on the Edge: 2,000 Black Holes At the center of the Milky Way galaxy there is a supermassive black hole that everything else has formed around. But it’s […]

It is hard to imagine a topic in science that Mary Roach won’t touch. After all, as Carl Zimmer put it, the acclaimed science writer “put her head in a […]

1. The Anti-drone Hoodie Some clothing is designed to make you stand out from the crowd. Then there are the clothes that are to designed to make you invisible to drones. […]

1. The Bill Gates Condom The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will award a $100,000 grant to the person who invents a next-generation condom that “significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in […]

3-D printers are currently capable of producing usable car parts, cat-scanned reproductions of ancient Sumerian clay envelopes with letters inside, and cool-looking geometric desktop toys. That’s very exciting indeed. But […]