Floating University

What will historians say about our time 250 years from now? Lawrence Summers asks this question in a thought-provoking lecture about the evolution of ideas.

We all want to be financially stable and enjoy a well-funded retirement, but we don’t want to squander our hard-earned money on poor investments.

Yale Professor Jeffrey Brenzel argues that reading the great classics can not only enrich your education, but also actually make your life better.

The most important thing about art is every person’s capacity to make it, and that the body/mind discipline of cultivating your artistic abilities has collateral utility for every aspect of life.

Our successes and failures are similarly linked to others, though we may feel their effects only personally. Every choice you make, every behavior you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe.  

Professor Douglas Melton takes a look at the basis for regenerative medicine, the human body’s ability to divide, grow, and specialize cells.

We’re halfway through our rollout of The Floating University here at Big Think. It’s some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web. Here’s number six of 12 on our list, featuring Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.

Money doesn’t make the world go round; it’s just a stand-in for value, and an arbitrary one at that.

Professor Michio Kaku delivers a glimpse of where science will take us in the next hundred years, as warp drives, teleportation, and time travel converge with our scientific understanding.

Warning: You might not want to watch this at the dinner table (it gets political), but in the name of having great discussion over important issues, we hope you will!

We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think. Here’s number two on our list, featuring Harvard linguist Steven Pinker.

We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think: It’s some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web.

Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community.  This week […]

The United States is entering uncharted waters as a superpower, as it slowly climbs out of a crippling recession and faces an electoral showdown this fall between cautious globalism and […]

Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus […]

Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community.  This week […]

It is one of the most debated subjects of all time: What is art? Some might think it doesn’t much matter whether or not consensus is achieved on this highly subjective […]

Using human stem cells to tackle human health issues remains controversial in the United States, but a team of Dutch researchers has found a potentially crowd-pleasing application of stem cell […]

 

Following the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, subsequent economic downturn, innumerable investigative journalism pieces about the big banks and investment practices, and finally the rise of the Occupy […]

Speech recognition technology continues to fascinate language and cognitive science researchers, and Apple’s introduction of the Siri voice assistant program in its recent iPhone 4S was heralded by many as […]

It used to be that if you went to an elite school you didn’t have access to the best minds unless you were physically in their presence. That is not […]

President Obama has unveiled his proposed 10-year budget today, and while there’s nothing particularly shocking included for those who have been following the ongoing debate between the White House and […]

Welcome to a new feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community.  This week […]

Just as Mitt Romney appears to be wrapping up the Republican nomination for the presidency, congressional Republicans are taking steps to set up their own political framework for the 2012 […]

Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like […]

As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane […]

Our university system is bloated, inefficient, too expensive, and increasingly out-of-sync with a digital society and global economy. Dr. Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard, is […]

Are we born with a sense of morality? 

In this excerpt from his lecture for The Floating University, Dr. Kaku explains that time machines do not violate Einstein’s laws of physics, and that future humans would be wise to build one and slip through a wormhole before the cooling universe extinguishes all known life.