bigthinkeditor

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” -Abraham Lincoln

Joel Primack: We’re about to cross a threshold “and have a complete understanding of the origin and the evolution of the universe.”

In order to innovate and solve the grand challenges facing the world, according to the entrepreneur Jack Hidary, we need to do more than just simply produce more scientists.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter launched yesterday, bringing with it a DVD containing over 1,100 hiakus. 

Mothers-in-law are the cause of sustained stress for more than 60 percent of married women.

This telephoto view from Kenya, captured on the morning of November 14, shows that Comet ISON has substantially increased in activity, surging to naked-eye visibility for dark sites and sprouting a more complex tail.

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.” -Doris Lessing, 1919 – 2013  

When we fail to exercise self-control, this may not be a “failure” as we traditionally think of it. In fact, it may be “a reasoned response to the uncertainty of time.

The Leonid meteor shower will be visible, weather permitting, tonight through Monday, November 18. NASA and the SLOOH Space Camera are both offering live streams of the all-night show of the Leonid Meteor Shower.

“I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe,” Hawking said.

Engaging men to advance women in the enterprise is a human issue. 

The ancient word philanthropy means loving humanity. You can help other people in a number of ways – with your ideas, your time, your energy, or with your money.

While jazz is a uniquely American invention that created rhythms from scratch, Quincy Jones says the genius of the art form can also be found in its appropriation of classical instruments.

We now have started to put together “a coherent picture of how the changing East African landscape has driven human evolution over the last ten million years.”

We experience emotions all the time that conflict with our core beliefs.

Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, but people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection.

Eric Siegel never thought he would experience a machine acting in a way that he would subjectively consider to be intelligent. IBM’s Watson, however,  changed all of that. 

Andrew Solomon shares a powerful lesson about unconditional love, about finding strength in broken places and about redefining one’s identity. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin locates Roosevelt’s leadership savvy in his ability to use his office as a persuasion machine.

“After a very long wait, the image that the world has awaited is finally here!”

To create a happy family, you don’t need some big, new scheme that’s going to be hard to set up and impossible to follow. 

One learns habits — good or bad — implicitly, without thinking about them. 

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.” -Robert Louis Stevenson (born on this day in 1850)  

Is the frequency of extreme weather events a sign that global warming is gaining pace and exceeding predictions?

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” – Auguste Rodin 

It’s difficult to wrap your head around the scale of destruction that was caused by Super-Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most intense tropical cyclones in history. Satellite images released by NASA and other agencies provide some perspective.

As we get older, our brain is more of a lean machine that is optimized to do things well. The tradeoff is that we are “not nearly as good at learning something new.”

Megan Smith talks about the role technologies like mobile and the Internet play in giving a voice to billions of people who up until this point had none.

There are potentially a lot more discoveries to be made within our oceans, with as little as 5% of it explored so far. 

“Eclipse watchers” have been dying to catch a glimpse of this image, captured in clear skies in central Africa, which depicts the Sun’s total eclipse on November 3.