bigthinkeditor

Facing the largest antigovernment protests in more than a decade, the Kremlin has, for now, softened its hard line against opponents. But is it simply digging in to wait them out?

The intriguing case of China’s success in obtaining the secret design of the American W-88 nuclear warhead illustrates the expertise of its espionage service—one that rivals the C.I.A..

A few months ago some said the U.S. was on the verge of a recession. Instead, the economy and efforts to renew stimulus are making headway. But for how much longer?

This 30-second spot was produced by Rick Perry’s campaign to run in Iowa in advance of the Iowa Caucus. The spot went viral on Youtube.

A Swiss government report finds that unauthorized file sharing is not a major problem and people should continue to be allowed to download copyrighted content for personal use.

Not only is China the country moving fastest to deploy the new internet protocol, IPv6, it is converting itself into the leader in developing advanced computing centers.

Mishandling personal data could cost multinationals billions of euros in fines and social media users would have a ‘right to be forgotten’ under proposed new E.U. data protection laws.

Using lots of brains each doing small tasks to together complete major jobs is not new but is enjoying a renaissance. Examples include Mechanical Turk, CrowdForge, and CastingWords.

One of the world’s most wired countries, South Korea, illustrates the downside of high speed internet and real name verification–an epidemic of hacking, data theft and botnets.

Do stubborn people actually win? Maybe the reason they take such an aggressive approach every time is that it works, says Steven Pinker.

Merkel and Sarkozy appear to have agreed on a fast-track eurozone consolidation on a take it or leave it basis as far as the rest of the E. U . is concerned.

Though it won by a seeming landslide, the results of Sunday’s Duma election in Russia reveal rising discontent among the Russian population. The results are really a disaster for Putin.

Calls are rising in the West for tougher actions against Iran. Here’s why Obama must strongly embrace a cold-war-style strategy of containment. Patient vigilance is called for.

Egypt’s euphoria over the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February later gave way to a creeping realization that the regime had not been toppled at all. What lies ahead?

After long wallowing in slow growth, there is cautious optimism that Africa now has a real chance to follow in the footsteps of Asia, thanks partly to the commodities boom.

In most workplaces, “you get promoted and promoted and promoted until you don’t perform that well,” says Ariely. But to what end? Ultimately, “if you follow this process, everybody will get to the level of incompetence.”

If a public stock offering went ahead, some say Facebook would use the cash for more acquisitions and refine or work on new projects, such as a Facebook phone or netbook.

Amid growing concerns about the psychological impact of widespread digital ‘enhancement’ of photos comes a new tool to reveal how much fashion and beauty pics have been altered.

Responding to privacy concerns, the European Commission plans to crackdown on Facebook allowing users’ most personal information to be used to create bespoke advertising.

If your product doesn’t need to be touched or demonstrated and is relatively small, your retail footprint is going to shrink. Bad news for retail clerks but exciting for entrepreneurs. because it could become easier to sell products in places that you couldn’t previously.Retail is going to shrink and proliferate. 

We’ve had the industrial revolution, and now we’re amid the data revolution. ‘Big data’ is a tectonic shift that will continue to affect many things we do for decades to come.

How could science fiction get it all so wrong? Big Think posed this question to Jim Kakalios, Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota in a previous post. In […]

In this amazing video, aerial acrobat and dare devil Yves Rossy jumps from a helicopter and flies over the Swiss Alps using a jet pack. Rossy then joins two jets […]

After decades of dictatorship, the people of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous state, have gone to the polls sharply polarized and confused over the nation’s direction.

Could the European Central Bank help avert a Euro meltdown if it bought up the bonds of ailing euro-zone countries on a bigger scale, thereby easing fears of their default?

The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers at the weekend will worsen the already deep American-Pakistani rift and could spark more tit-for-tat retaliation.

There are fears on both sides of the political spectrum in France that if China helps fund a European bailout it will come at the cost of some of their sovereignty.

How did we go from seeing genocide and other large-scale crimes against humanity as a consensus-free zone to today’s overwhelming acceptance of the “responsibility to protect”?

Stanford’s experiment in offering its three most popular computer science classes to the public for free online has seen a huge take-up, with 200,000 people enrolled.

The emotional rollercoaster ride that lies behind they hype of being a high tech start-up founder is seldom talked about. Success, not sadness, sells, but it’s not the whole story.