bigthinkeditor

Oil is not properly priced from anyone’s standpoint. Coal is not an acceptable answer. Where does that leave us?

The video below, released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Mars Express, is a stunning flyover of the planet, showcasing grabens, dendritic valleys, lava flows and the highest known mountain in the Solar System. 

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors?

Brain decoding is the technique by which neuroscientists are able to decipher what a person is experiencing during a dream. 

Most traffic is the result of extremely subtle changes in the flow of traffic, caused, for instance, be drivers speeding up or slowing down ever so slightly. This has a ripple effect.

At the end of next month, Comet ISON is expected to be at its brightest, when it is nearest to the Sun. Still, no one knows exactly what it will look like. 

Having been raised with traditional views of womanhood, Fatimah Asghar says “I was invisible for most of my life.” That is no longer the case for the award-winning poet and performer. 

There is evolutionary significance to the petty acts of aggression that were famously portrayed by Lindsay Lohan and other young women in the 2004 film Mean Girls. 

The AI company Vicarious has created an algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA “with greater than 90% accuracy.”

Viewed in silhouette, Sombrero and Little Sombrero both have large central bulges along with thin disks and dust lanes. 

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” -Pablo Picasso (born on this day in 1881)  

Stargazer John Chumack used a homemade telescope and a QHY8 cooled single shot color CCD camera to capture this image. 

We need to be inspired by fiction in order for our imagination to develop pathways to solving problems. 

What if the NSA scandals result in a more fragmented global Internet? What if they are used as an excuse by repressive regimes to violate their own citizens’ privacy?

In the United States we have shamefully convinced most high school students that they either need to go to Harvard or they need to go to McDonald’s.

Dozens of papers have been published to create the perfect commuting algorithm. But how do you account for factors like the weather? Or even local politics?

Like a greyhound race, politics is a competition. And as the rabbit keeps moving ahead, the greyhounds are incentivized to keep chasing. Consistency bias is simply the failure to admit that’s what we’re doing. 

In a provocative thought experiment, Jonathon Keats considers how two seemingly incompatible systems – religion and science – might find a way “to talk to each other or at least to cross paths.”

A new study confirms what common sense would tell us, namely, that you need to try what is unfamiliar and mentally challenging to improve cognitive function. This might involve learning a new skill, like photography. 

For a short period in human history, the two-way flow of information was overshadowed by mass media. Today, the pendulum is swinging back to the way things used to be. 

Support for legalizing marijuana is now 58 percent. There are few other issues, save gay marriage, where public opinion has changed so dramatically.

Consider how much more beautiful and authentic and sophisticated and accurate our world would become if we could appreciate the key terminologies of all cultures.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson argue that remote working is not some cooky brainchild of software developers. “The future, quite literally, belongs to those who get it.”

Over 270 robotics researchers have signed on to a proposed ban on weapons systems that can fire “without a human in the loop.”

HealthCare.gov contains an estimated 500 million lines of code. To put that in context, that is five times the amount of code as contained in a large bank’s computer system. 

Divorce may be contagious, but so are lasting relationships. Attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages may serve to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship.

If life expansion becomes achievable, the question still remains whether it will be accessible for everyone, as opposed to just the super rich.

Various participants within the growing field of “impact investing” are developing a range of innovative approaches to deploy private sector capital to solve pressing social challenges. 

Filmmaker Casey Neistat explains how the democratization of filmmaking led to his unlikely career as a filmmaker – a career that began one day while playing with a 2000 iMac DV in the trailer park where he was living. 

Contrary to some media reports, the chance of 2013 TV135 colliding with Earth is only 1 in 63,000 according to NASA.