bigthinkeditor

How can a more realistic outlook on the 1950s shed light on the times we are living through today? 

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” -Albert Camus  

One hundred years ago, your doctor was responsible for your health. Now, thanks to technology, we’re at the point where we can all be the CEO of our own health.

According to some experts, trans fats won’t be that difficult to replace.

A new study demonstrates how a group can complement and “average out” one’s unattractive idiosyncrasies.

“Our dominance is assured, at least for a while, by the excruciating nested complexity of the biological components-within-components-within-components of the human brain.”

Kepler-78b, which is slightly larger than Earth, is the most similar in size to the Earth of any exoplanet yet directly discovered. However, the similarities end there. 

I believe imagination was a God-given tool says, Rainn Wilson in the XPRIZE Insights video below. Wilson sees arts education, therefore, as an empowering tool, which “helps define a person for who they are in their integral self.”

Artists have an implicit understanding of a universal biological principle: “people have limited attentional resources.”

According to a new study, the number of planets in our galaxy that could potentially support life as we know it could be as high as 40 billion.

A Big Idea Prize has been announced that will award a full-ride scholarship to a Presidio degree program for the best “Big Idea” to move the needle in sustainability.

Instead of predicting what a human might do, this computer is incredibly fast at recognizing what a human is doing. 

“Today I’m going to work on my water machine to supply clean water to 4 billion people.” Dean Kamen wouldn’t be able to say that unless he happened to be an eternal optimist.

These two images represent what is known as a hybrid eclipse, which involves both a total eclipse and an annular eclipse. That is what happened this weekend. The image comparison above is from 2005. 

Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, believes that if world leaders experienced what she did, they would come up with very different policies. 

It isn’t feasible to think that the potential tripling or even quadrupling of energy demand in the coming years can be met with renewable energy sources. 

The very fact that Bach’s music is so profound and so uplifting and the man is clearly not a saint makes it all the more interesting. 

The author of The Red Badge of Courage, born on this day in 1871, shares today’s wisdom.

The last solar eclipse of 2013 will take place November 3 and it will be a hybrid solar eclipse, meaning it will start out as an annular eclipse with a “ring of fire” (depicted above) and then become a full solar eclipse. 

What do we know about the biblical character Goliath? “He was tall and maybe he didn’t see so well; even WebMD wouldn’t be so bold as to diagnose with no more than that.”

If creativity and optimism are childish fancies, bring it on. The adult world needs more of that. 

The story of candy is really a story of American industrialization, sensuality, the beginnings of artificial food, and the seduction and independence of children, as they first use candy to control their own pleasure. 

A plot of land in a cemetery is both a waste of space and money. It is also rather morbid – the stuff of Halloween displays – not to mention uncreative. 

There are many ways to transmit big ideas – through videos, through the written word, or as the title of this blog attests, through pictures that are worth more than 1,000 words.

Our primal fear can make modern humans oversensitive, and cause us to react to dangers that don’t exist and push us to make illogical and irrational decisions. 

When one hears the word “oligarch,” one might think of the Russian billionaires who control the production of petroleum, natural gas and metal, and as a result, wield a disproportionate amount of power in Putin’s Russia.

Baseball fans are “the most digitally-wired on the planet.” And that is paying off very well for Major League Baseball.  

An expert is someone whose purpose in life is to tell you why something won’t work. So goes the old adage, but the entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain isn’t buying it.

Nobody knows for sure what is inside two floating barges, owing to some extraordinary secrecy measures that have been taken. 

Fifty-two percent of Americans believe the death penalty is applied fairly in the United States — a smaller figure than the 60% who favor the death penalty.