bigthinkeditor

John Pistole, head of the Transportation Security Administration, says the inconvenience of body scanners and pat downs is a small price to pay for safety.

Analytically, the task of deficit reduction is simple: cutting expenditures and raising rntaxes, says Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in his plan to reduce long-term budget deficits.

A bacterium found in the arsenic-filled waters of a Californian lake is poised to overturn scientists’ understanding of the biochemistry of living organisms, says Nature.

If you were to track the daily happenings that flatten people’s moods, you would likely find rejection at the core.

We ought to make opt-out easy but beware of injuring the model that brings us free content.

We are full of the accumulated baggage of our idiosyncratic histories. From hiccups to wisdom teeth, the evolution of homo sapiens has left behind some glaring imperfections.

We can start changing attitudes to pay inequality by looking each other in the eye and asking each other what we earn – without pride, without bitterness.

Putting U.S. secrets on the Internet…requires a reconceptualization of sabotage and espionage — and the laws to punish and prevent them.

The Federal Reserve has made public an enormous trove of data about the emergency measures it took during the worst of the credit crunch and the ensuing recession.

The best way to avoid a new Korean War is to deter future North Korean provocations. Reducing U.S. forces in the region doesn’t do that.

The perception is that the minds of the 22 FIFA members were already made up, either through vote trading or through friendships and contacts over many years.

In an effort to head off increasing scrutiny of Internet privacy, a group of online tracking rivals is building a service that lets consumers see what those companies know about them.

2010 marks the first year that the U.S. will have a national strategy and implementation plan for combatting HIV/AIDS domestically. 

The special bond that often forms between people and both domesticated and wild animals maybe be, paradoxically, part of what makes us human, says Dave Munger.

The United States clearly is like other countries in some respects and unlike them in other respects. Exceptionalism thus isn’t of much use as an analytic construct.

Good metaphors are expansive; they compare something we don’t understand, to something we do. You see in a new light both the object of interest and the substrate you rest it on.

A constant news cycle of horrific bullying stories has some parents frequently intervening in their children’s social lives, but they may be dooming their kids in the process.

Ronald Reagan’s tax simplification measures in the 1980s are to blame for America’s high healthcare costs, says The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. Especially the employer tax credit.

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?

As anyone who has walked through an Ikea knows, stores are increasingly designed to draw your interest into the depths of an ecstatic shopping experience.

People’s predilections for promiscuity lie partially in their DNA, according to a new study. The researchers are careful to point out that transgressors are not off the hook.

Will a new clean energy industry—the production of wind turbines and solar cells—be able to replace the manufacturing jobs which have vacated the Rust Belt states?

CLARION is a computer program that performs the same way human subjects do in some impressive cognitive tests—not by mimicking what we think, but how we think.

Some AIDS activists and epidemiologists believe that agressive testing and treatment might be enough to stave off the epidemic for good. 

Two years ago, the Swiss Federal commission for HIV/AIDS released a controversial statement indicating that people who are HIV-positive and on regular antiretroviral therapy do not transmit the disease through […]

The world’s largest particle accelerator has produced a primordial state of matter akin to what existed at the dawn of the universe by smashing lead ions together creating small Big Bangs.

Comcast has become the quintessential broadband bully—an image that is part outside perception, part self-fulfilling prophecy. Here is a look at Comcast’s missteps along the way.

Despite the reality of fighting two foreign wars, it is hard to recall a time when foreign policy issues played so diminished a role in the American public’s thinking.

Fleeting feelings of heat—such as a warm drink or living in a tropical region—increase our willingness to trust strangers. New research on how bodily cues influence our beliefs.

The latest deadly school shooting, in Wisconsin, will result in agitation for the right to bear arms, not gun control. Go figure, says Alex Hannaford at The Guardian.