bigthinkeditor

The very fact that fair trade conforms to market principles is what unnerves some. If an activity makes market sense, they suspect that it can’t be politically genuine.

Google pulled off a huge PR coup. It changed the topic. Media coverage isn’t about spam and how Google profits from this; we are debating how valuable Google’s search results are.

Stone Age people, unlike their Neandertal contemporaries, had heel bones spring-loaded for long runs, a new study suggests.

More than 10 percent of adults worldwide are now obese. Obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are no longer Western problems or problems of wealthy nations.

Harvey Weinstein lost his beloved Miramax studio, millions of dollars, and his passion for filmmaking. How Hollywood’s last true impresario returned in triumph, in time for Oscar season.

The U.K. government’s child mental health strategy is a waste of money based on dodgy statistics. If there is a problem with childhood behavior, it is a crisis of adult authority.

Millions of people in the Middle East want freedom. Twenty years ago, the West was a role model, but it betrays its own values. It is also strengthening its enemy: militant Islamism.

If anything will prevent the next financial crisis, it will be financial firms recognizing bubbles and popping them early, with regulators ensuring risk-takers eat the losses. Vigilance is the word.

Why are conservatives jumping on the bandwagon and shifting from “tough on crime” to “smart on crime.” Fiscal concerns are a motive, plus the failure of drug and criminal justice policies.

A NASA telescope counting planets in one neighborhood of the Milky Way registered more than 1,200 candidates, including 54 in life-friendly orbits around their parent stars.

The report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been assailed as a confusing mishmash—poorly organized and weakened by obvious and unsatisfying conclusions.

Nobody should be surprised to see unauthorized movie downloads booming when the authorized kind remain so difficult to find. Movie studios should seek to satisfy demand.

The thought that hormones somehow “control” our moods and behaviors is a falsehood, a popular oversimplification that hinders the understanding of what is actually going on.

Michael Hartl is the author of The Tau Manifesto, which argues that, quite simply, pi is wrong. He’s also a physicist who has previously both studied and taught at Harvard and Caltech.

The American economy isn’t back, says Robert Reich. While Wall Street’s bull market is making America’s rich even richer, most Americans continue to be mired in the housing crisis.

On February 2nd Apple and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched the Daily, a digital-only newspaper available by subscription. Does the move set a worrying precedent?

The least interesting fact about the Egyptian protests is that some of the protesters may have employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with each other.

A new study finds that poor adolescents who live in communities with more social cohesiveness are less likely to smoke and be obese as adolescents.

Scientists claim the average hug lasts for three seconds, but it has long been claimed that computers could allow us to do so remotely using electrical sensors.

Tempers ran high at Big Think’s Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco this week when Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accused Microsoft’s Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.

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.