bigthinkeditor
If you’ve ever responded to tragedy by raging at God, you’re not alone. A new study finds that anger at God is a common emotion among Americans.
A renewable energy startup is making deals that are attracting business. The company helps its clients to get photovoltaics on the roof without putting them on the books.
Amazingly, your walking speed is just as good an indicator of how long you’ll live as your health history, smoking habits, and blood pressure combined.
Today’s super-rich are different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity.
For most people, social networking consists of status updates, virtual cows, and bizarre Kanye tweets. But actor and philanthropist Edward Norton believes that social networking can truly change the world, […]
As evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa explains during his Big Think interview, many of humankind’s most important psychological traits stopped evolving over 10,000 years ago. Today, many of our unconscious biases […]
By allowing users to create and polish their personal brand, Facebook has become the magic mirror of our narcissistic and self-publicising era, says Philippe Rivière.
Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, says Stephen Hawking. But are Hawking’s theoretical ideas not philosophical in their essence?
Mood rings famously are meant to change color to reflect the mood of the wearer. Some are cheap and ugly. Some are expensive and set in precious metal. All work using the same mechanics.
One of the biggest mysteries of physics could end with what scientists find 4,850 feet below the Black Hills of South Dakota, where a laboratory will replace a defunct gold mine.
Whether Goldman Sachs’ $450 million investment in Facebook will create another technology bubble depends on how and when emerging tech companies go public.
When we feel distant from our work—when it seems wonderfully far away—we are able to think about work in a new way. We have the breakthrough while on break, says Jonah Lehrer.
Smear campaigns work because people are more likely to believe misinformation about someone they see as different from themselves, sometimes even blatant lies.
Men and women may be more similar to each other than we think—the process of sex determination is not over by birth, but continues into life, up to and including puberty.
Gross domestic product is taken to be the leading indicator of national well-being. But we should ask ourselves: is it really wise to accord such importance to growth?
Only lately have researchers begun to study courage systematically, to try to define what it is, where it comes from and how it manifests itself in the body and brain.
When students ask Sally Blount how she became the first female dean of an internationally renowned U.S. business school, she warns them not to look at her career for any […]
For a disorder that affects 1 in every 110 American children and 1 in every 70 American boys, there are a surprising number of misconceptions about autism. Study after study […]
Libertarians, of both left and right, haven’t been this close to power since 1776. But do we want to live in their world? To what extend do we really want freedom?
William Burroughs famously remarked that Islam had hit a one thousand year writer’s block. Is this assessment justified, especially in the areas of science and politics?
In the nineteenth century, filibusters were rarer than visible comets. Now they are as common as sunsets—and as destructive as tsunamis, says The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.
After seven months, The New York Times’ series on philosophy closes today. Simon Critchley reminds us what questions philosophy seeks to answer, such as, “What is knowledge?”
There can be few drivers who have not wanted to hurl a G.P.S. system out of the window when it guides the car into a traffic jam. Will new emotionally sensitive systems help?
The U.S. spends much more per student than any other country. Yet from the very beginning, American students have generally performed below average compared to other rich countries.
More than 2.5 billion people around the world lack access to formal financial services. But new mobile banking services in Africa are helping millions of people out of poverty.
Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough already, says Amherst economics professor Richard Wolff.
Whether running for president of the United States or for city council, politicians can count on seeing their words broken into ever smaller and more fragmentary bits.
John Stuart Mill, in his classic defense of liberty, argued that each individual is the best guardian of his or her own interests. But recent research suggests that we can use some help.
The next time you take in a movie, you may be getting a lesson in cutting-edge physics without even knowing it. Many special effects would be impossible without fluid dynamics.
Number one on many scientists’ 2011 to-do list is to find the Higgs boson—a particle so important to science that it’s been dubbed the “God particle.”