bigthinkeditor

“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”- James Joyce

“I will not take ‘but’ for an answer.”- Langston Hughes (born on this date in 1902)

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”- Jackie Robinson (born on this date in 1919)

“A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.”- Franklin D. Roosevelt (born on this date in 1882)

“The inner self is as distinct from the outer self as heaven is from earth.” ― Emanuel Swedenborg (born on this date in 1688)

“Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.”Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (born on this date in 1873)

One might say of Bach’s time, it’s unheard of to combine opera with a religious theme, my dear. 

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”- Lewis Carroll (born on this date in 1832)

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.”- General Douglas MacArthur (born on this date in 1880)

An experimental device has been unveiled in a paper in the journal Nature that promises to be able to keep accurate time for the next 5 billion years. 

Supernova SN 2014J is one of the closest to be seen in recent decades and is now the brightest part of M82 and visible in small telescopes in the evening sky.

Stephen Hawking has proposed a breakthrough theory in a new paper – the idea that black holes can exist without an event horizon. 

Kirk Johnson: It was an amazing discovery that we’re all related, but it was not obvious.  It’s not obvious that I’m related to a strawberry.  

“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”- Virginia Woolf (born on this date in 1882)

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”- Edith Wharton

The light from an exploding star in the Messier 82 (aka “Cigar”) galaxy was first photographed from Earth on January 22nd, 2013. 

To enter adulthood, your brain needs to remodel itself to handle the unsafe and the uncertain. 

Questions can be submitted via Twitter today using the #AskSnowden hashtag. 

“The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being.” – Sergei Eisenstein (born on this date in 1898)

You don’t have to submit to your enemies at all in order to control your anger toward them. In fact, you can drive them crazy – and who wouldn’t want to do that to an enemy?

“According to one recent estimate,” writes Robert de Neufville on Anthropocene, “the Earth could—theoretically at least—produce food for more than 280 billion people.”

“The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”- George Balanchine (born on this date in 1904)

In the video below, watch as SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor powers the spacecraft to a top speed of Mach 1.4, or 1.4 times the speed of sound. 

A message from the “Interstellar Safety Council” warns other life forms not to visit Earth, a planet that is governed by “the survival of the fittest.”

The apparent size of this Full Moon is compared to the last Full Super Moon (from last June), which was when the Moon was at its closest point in its orbit.

Facebook has the same properties as an infectious disease. It has spread infectiously and will die off in a manner that is consistent with epidemiological models.

“What should exist? To me, that’s the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don’t have? How can we realize our potential?”- Paul Allen (born on this date in 1953)

In the Human Genome Project, multiple countries and thousands of scholars proved how a “grandly large project” could be completed if it has “a very defined goal.”

If the products and services of U.S. companies are seen as “compromised,” technology executives worry that foreign consumers may abandon them in favor of “N.S.A.-resistant” products such as the blackphone that Big Think wrote about recently. 

A startup called Elio Motors is preparing to launch a $6,800 car in 2015 that boats impressive efficiency – up to 84 miles per gallon for highway driving (49 miles per gallon for urban driving).