bigthinkeditor
Apple’s appeal has gone beyond good business inspiring in its customers firm loyalty to the brand and a following that resembles religious devotion.
Homosexual activity has been documented in many animal species but labeling animals as gay carries social baggage that scientists want to keep out of their research.
The Los Angeles Times calls for studies on the effects of secondhand smoke in outdoor environments in order to determine whether smoking outdoors should be banned.
March Madness isn’t the only insanity surrounding the American (and global) obsession with sports but just how skewed have our priorities become?
Treasury Secretary Geithner has delayed his report to Congress on the Chinese currency hoping to persuade China to appreciate the Yuan soon.
A Chinese oil tanker that has run aground on the Great Barrier Reef is leaking oil and threatening to break up entirely, causing a greater spillage.
Leader of the left on the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens is expected to retire during Obama’s first term; Bloomberg looks at three potential nominees to fill his vacancy.
The Guardian examines the incoherences in Tea Party politics and spelling as demonstrators continue to modify (misspell) the English language in amusing ways.
Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the neo-Nazi party in South Africa, has been cut down by one of his own farmhands ending a career of political extremism, terrorism and violence.
New research finds correlation between worried pregnant women and their children who show slower cognitive development, but don’t worry, the study concludes.
Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate of the United States, told Big Think that the first poem she ever wrote, at the age of 10 or 11, was about Easter: “In […]
Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes that Martin Luther King’s reasoning for contesting the War in Vietnam is valid in Afghanistan, but, like before, few are listening.
Scientists have blocked cell activity in the brain’s moral reasoning region inducing people to use purely consequential reasoning rather than consider moral principles.
New EPA standards will regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks through 2016 requiring a base efficiency of 34 miles per gallon in six years’ time.
Ahead of Saturday’s iPad launch, CNN looks at Apple’s new computer to answer questions and distinguish it from other computers already in our homes and offices.
Romanians flocking to burger joints in their post-communist gorge may soon be subject to a junk food tax intended to reduce national obesity rates and fill government coffers.
Hirings in manufacturing and health-care industries boosted the national payroll in March though companies were more likely to take on temporary workers than full-time employees.
The recent earthquake in Chile was the fifth largest ever recorded and the U.S. Geological Survey is investigating damaged buildings there to better understand our own California.
U.K. law prohibits selecting the sex of your child unless serious medical issues are involved and this has Brits flocking to the U.S. to balance out their families.
Long denied by the government, former engineers and spies of Area 51 speak out publicly about working at the secret source of UFO folklore.
New U.S. airport security measures mark the end of broad national and racial profiling in favor of intelligence-based screening criteria.
Two new books — one by a Roman Catholic journalist, the other by an atheist novelist — offer modern responses to the difficult concept that Jesus was both mortal and divine.
Researchers have developed two new broadband acoustic systems that could represent a major improvement in how fish and other marine life are counted and classified.
A Tel Aviv University researcher has found that young men who smoke are likely to have lower IQs than their non-smoking peers.
Some of the most innovative baseball teams have rebuilt their teams this year around an ascendant strategy that defense is the key to victory. But can nifty glovework please homer-hungry fans?
David Brooks writes that the recession has helped teach Americans about the dangers of debt, “but there’s probably going to have to be a public crusade — like the ones against littering and smoking — to hammer the point home.”
Dorothy Parker’s popularity may have been part of the reason that academia was slow to take up her poetry, writes R. S. Gwynn. But now even feminists have taken her into the literary canon.
Has the culture of “white 20-somethings dressed in skinny jeans and lumberjack shirts, and wearing thick-rimmed glasses” begun its inevitable decline?
Twenty-one years ago, the term “mommy track” was born. Angie Kim thinks the concept “needn’t be the dull fate feminists predicted — and, increasingly, it’s not.”
David Lewis-Williams doesn’t think direct arguments against religion will have much effect on men unless they are gradually illuminated by science.