bigthinkeditor

In two years NASA hopes to be growing plants on the moon in an experiment designed to shed light on how life can be sustained in extreme conditions. 

The comet is believed to have broken up and evaporated. 

Will Comet ISON survive its close encounter with the Sun?

Bill Nye – who turns 58 today – says teaching science needs to be a hands-on experience in order for it to be really effective. Like the funniest moments in life, you might say, you had to be there.

Some students take the position that the best way to change an organization is from the inside. Therefore, going to work for a company that, for instance, produces tobacco products, is the best way to affect change.

Scientists are unsure whether a coronal mass ejection from the sun – pictured here – took the sungrazing comet out. 

Learning faster is becoming more and more important, and we simply learn faster in cities than we could on our own.

Countries like Finland, South Korea and Poland got smarter not by spending more money or creating more tests. The children learned how to think, and to thrive in the modern economy. 

When the President gives a speech today, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Big Think, “you might hear the pundits tearing it down before he even finishes the speech.” 

As François Jacob famously said, evolution is a tinkerer and not an engineer. When you’re a tinkerer, you throw things together to solve the problem at hand. 

How do 21st century photo editing techniques impact classic conceptions of beauty? Just have a look at the image above, by the Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano. Giordano’s Venus project gives Photoshop makeovers to paintings such as Botticelli’s La Nascita di Venere.

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, tells Big Think that people should have access to anything that is fundamentally theirs.

MIT’s Donald Sadoway advocates “science and service to society” as opposed to “science and service of career building.”

Animators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. created this short movie showing how the sun can cook a comet. 

This “autonomous pack horse” is designed to interact with troops in a “natural way” like a trained animal would. 

Ready. Set. Go: dark matter in one minute. 

The extreme form of distrust and cynicism can lead to paranoia. The milder form is the much more common cognitive bias known as the “fundamental attribution error.”

NASA’s Earth Observatory detected a slab of ice 21 miles by 12 miles, or about the size of Singapore, floating in Pine Island Bay, south-west of Chile.

Astronomers in April, 2013 saw the biggest and brightest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, a large gamma-ray burst.

It is no secret that the late rock musician Kurt Cobain felt alienated growing up. But a recently released animated video, which illustrates a lost interview he gave in 1993, reveals surprising insights about the rage he felt as a teenager and how he came to express it in punk rock. 

Public health campaigns have been ineffective. So the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued a grand challenge to design “a next-generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances pleasure.”

The FCC is considering a proposal that would allow “airborne calls and cellular data use by passengers once a flight reaches 10,000 feet,” while maintaining restrictions during takeoff and landing.

Have we already reached peak car? This is the term that urban planners are using to describe the decline in vehicle miles traveled per person. 

We are so conditioned to relating to others in adversarial terms that we seldom think of how futile that is as an everyday code of conduct. 

An oyster reef costs about the same amount of money – $1 million per mile – as a seawall. But when you consider other factors outside of cost, the oyster reef wins by a mile.  

The mission would have to take advantage of next alignment of Earth and Mars, which occurs in 2017. Miss that window and we’ll have to wait another 15 years to take advantage of the orbital dynamics of the planets, which significantly reduce the distance and cost of the trip. 

While harkening back to our hunter-gather ancestors may be good nutrition, it’s not necessarily good thinking. 

Early humans lived in a world that one evolutionary geneticist compared to the fantasy world of Lord of the Rings. Not only were there many hominid populations, but these populations interbred, contributing to the genetic diversity of modern humans.

This image is an artist’s illustration of the 4U1630-47 star system featuring powerful jets emanating from a black hole candidate that is just a few times the mass of our sun. So what type of matter is contained in these jets?  

Neuroscientist Christof Koch proposes that consciousness is to be found in complex systems all around us. Therefore a dog, or a smaller animal like an earthworm, or even the Internet, all possess consciousness.