The multicultural joke goes like this: The Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves in a tough spot, surrounded by hostile Native Americans. “We’d better get out of here,” the Lone […]
Search Results
You searched for: x x
Last week, the last vestiges of the pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer’s journalistic respectability evaporated. Wired, which had stuck with him through a summer of revelations about his self-borrowing, plagiarism and […]
The Ekso is a bionic exoskeleton designed by Ekso Bionics in order to help wheelchair users walk. Essentially a wearable robot, the Ekso allows people who suffer from paralysis or […]
Fitocracy is a social fitness network that rewards its users with experience points, allowing them to level up and complete fitness “quests” with other users, creating a fun and challenging […]
The XTR3D is a touch-free software interface that only requires a simple 2-D camera to operate. XTR3D creates a three-dimensional image of the user which can then be used to […]
Soccket, a soccer ball that stores the energy generated while playing with it, was developed by Uncharted Play, Inc. The product of an engineering class for non-engineers at Harvard, Soccket […]
Le Chal, a shoe that may replace the cane for a visually impaired person, was developed by Anirudh Sharma. Le Chal, or “The Take-Me-There Shoe,” uses a phone’s GPS along […]
Perhaps the world’s most fiercely original aerospace engineer, Rutan has pioneered beautifully designed aircraft that (successfully) go against the grain of conventional wisdom.
What’s the Big Idea? At TEDxSummit 2012, Hans Rosling predicted that mankind’s population threshold will be 10 Billion people. His talk was entitled Religion and Babies, as his goal was […]
Could the unforgiving Taklamakan Desert once have been the location of the Garden of Earthly Delights?
The word’s biggest science experiment has found a home. Well, two homes. Radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia will search for data from the early days of the Universe.
There are approximately 105,000 people currently on the waiting list for solid organ transplant in the United States. 18 of those people die every day. These deaths are due entirely to […]
NASA engineer Adam Steltzner is driving his team to attempt the seemingly impossible.
The future is a difficult thing to grasp, and not just because we can’t see it. Bringing innovation to life requires imagination, resourcefulness, the sort of limitless creative ambition we today associate mainly with science fiction writers.
As Silicon Valley startups race to develop the next generation of sophisticated, algorithmic marketing software, it’s instructive to note the success of Thinkmodo – a viral marketing firm that films all its videos on iphones, does no market testing, and doesn’t even mention the name of the product in its campaigns.
Having a great depth of knowledge in a specific field limits your problem solving abilities to what has worked in the past, says entrepreneurial polymath Naveen Jain.
Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says you can’t rely on “the media” or the internet to control your information consumption. Here he suggests a few pieces of software that have helped him to regulate his own information diet.
While we don’t always realize it we are better connected, healthier and more secure than any generation before us.
There’s a four-week mission to Mars taking place right now, complete with a Mars landing module known as the LEM, a full-size Mars rover, a mobile quarantine unit, a bio lab and […]
In our increasingly complex world we can’t afford to silo ourselves off in little online and offline subcultures.
Big Think is excited to announce Humanizing Technology, a virtual expo in partnership with Bing, whose goal is to identify new technologies that integrate themselves seamlessly into our lives, capitalize on our unique strengths, and amplify the best of human nature.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision on healthcare reform put more than health policy on the public agenda – it triggered a recurring debate in the United States on the power […]
In 1962, the latest and greatest form of artificial illumination was invented; the light emitting diode (LED). In recent years, they have reached a level of illumination suitable for most applications of indoor lighting.
The private space company SpaceX has successfully launched a rocket that will soon carry supplies to the International Space Station. Its ultimate goal is a manned mission to Mars.
University students and private companies are racing to build the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. Google and the X Prize Foundation are offering $20 million to the winner.
Financial management and youth are like oil and vinegar–they don’t mix. Managing finances is a distant and removed—and thus boring–prospect for most young people. In fact, the very idea of […]
The American democracy increasingly rests in the hands of professional politicians and special interest lobbies. In the age of the citizen scientist, we need a renaissance of the citizen citizen.
The moon is closer, we can get there faster, lunar missions are less risky and equipped with better technology. The company MoonEx has been planning lunar mining with NASA for years.
Near the end of his 2001 book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Henry Kissinger quotes Otto von Bismarck’s observation about the limits of diplomacy: “The best a statesman can […]
“We are stardust. We are golden. We are billion year old carbon. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” sang Joni Mitchell in her song “Woodstock.” Every […]