bigthinkeditor

There’s nothing new under the sun, or, to put it another way, there is nothing new about Twitter’s 140-character format for microblog posts.

The sunk cost fallacy means making a choice based on a desire not to see your past investment go to waste.

Is it pure dumb luck that we have not had an accident involving nuclear weapons? In fact, we have had many such accidents. 

“The more players that want to create original content and finance it,” Littlefield says, “the more exciting it is in the world of ideas.”

What would make a quantum computer so powerful is the ability to do many computations at same time.

The basic technologies to enable us to look inside the brain and see its functioning are growing exponentially. And they’re at a point now where we can actually see individual interneural connections forming and firing.

The unemployment rate is high among young people, but much higher among the young of the working class.  What does this mean for the future of what we used to think of as “adulthood.”

While Francis points the finger at leaders who have been “obsessed” with divisive social issues, some find his silence on these issues to be problematic.

How is it that certain clothes give us more confidence, so much confidence, in fact, that we find ourselves performing better when wearing them?

Why does the original pronunciation (OP) of Shakespeare’s words matter? For one thing, two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets have rhymes that don’t work in modern English. 

Why is that when we are in love we are nonetheless in mourning?

The Harvest Moon is the full moon that occurs closest to fall’s equinox. This full moon will peak tomorrow morning at 7:13am EDT.

A 1,476-foot tower approved to be built in Seoul, South Korea is being promoted as the world’s first “invisible tower.” 

According to the UN’s report, “Bashar al-Assad was likely responsible.”

The British physicist Steven Hawking is living proof that someone can overcome enormous obstacles and still flourish as a human being.

No hurricanes. No cyclones. No tropical storms in the Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian Ocean. That was September 8, 2013.

The majority of crack addicts and methamphetamine addicts are rational decision-makers. 

Being only 12, Agrawal’s version of an iRobot is not designed to do household chores but rather, deliver potato chips.

Manil Suri gives a full-throated defense of math as a field that is “about ideas above anything else.” 

Thanks to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission’s Wide Angle Camera (WAC), a high resolution virtual Moon rotation movie has now been composed. 

The following letter was sent by Larry Summers to President Obama, in which he withdrew his name for consideration to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

There is often disagreement between what the public considers controversial and what scientists consider controversial.  

It is unclear how extensively the radiation has been spread by other fish throughout the ocean’s ecosystem.  

Voyager 1 is the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, NASA has been able to confirm, based on measurements of the ionized gas that the spaceship travels through. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted “I’ve never understood those who assert that killing people with chemicals is worse than blowing them to bits with a bomb.” What do you think?

The change away from having to experience darkness, which we take for granted, is arguably one of the greatest disruptions of the natural order in the whole modern human experience.

After billions of years of “torturous evolution,” an intelligent civilization might finally come about, only to “snuff themselves out in an instant of unforgivable neglect.”

What’s a toilet worth? The infographic below shows the annual cost of lack of access to sanitation. 

NASA’s “black-hole-hunter” spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has serendipitously discovered its first 10 supermassive black holes.

Elon Musk tends to be interested in industries that “a lot of people think are impossible or think you can’t succeed at – that’s usually where there’s opportunity.”