bigthinkeditor
Powerful yet tiny particles known as nanostructures will support new antibiotics that act like magnets to destroy bacteria and disease and potentially cancer, according to a new study.
While natural disasters such as floods and tornadoes have captured our attention this summer, the scale of destruction is very slight compared to the worst man-made disasters.
Lebanon, a country plagued by slow Internet, was a popular choice for an International Emmy for “Digital Program: Fiction” at Cannes for its drama series Shankaboot.
Nicole Ferraro says Facebook is somewhat upfront about how many people actually use its site but Twitter claims it has 175 million registered users yet fails to say how many are active.
A Swiss court says Google must guarantee all faces and license plates photographed as part of its Street View maps are unrecognizable, even though Google says it’ll cost too much.
Moore’s Law explains why the price of everything electronic keeps going down. Richard Bennett explains some exceptions. Don’t expect bandwith prices to halve every 18 months.
A new case study from Harvard Business School looks at how National Geographic dealt with the many challenges of changing its business model from paper to digital.
Consumer-oriented cloud applications make it really easy for employees to share sensitive corporate documents, maybe too easy, warns Maria Korolov.
Digital technologies and the Internet are affecting every aspect of film production, distribution, marketing, and consumption and have spawned the online film festival.
For the first time, Australians can turn off behavioural advertising used on the websites of most of the country’s major online advertisers.
The Madden video game series seeks to hone a message that is difficult for many young football players to accept: get a concussion, and you are off the field for the rest of the day.
Believing in a supernatural being who monitored and judged anyone at all times encouraged people to avoid acting on their immoral impulses, helping them survive, says author Jesse Bering.
We live in a society obsessed with performance. Think of exams like the S.A.T. and the G.R.E. Such high-stakes tests, however, are often spectacularly bad at predicting performance in the real world.
When faced with the thought of death, people are more likely to believe in intelligent design, the idea that life on Earth can be explained by an “intelligent being” guiding the process.
The brain is always anticipating what will come next—for example, what someone will say. This explains why jokes are funny: they add a twist to information our brain was anticipating.
While losing work is stressful, recent findings show wellbeing associated with disengagement at work may result in an equal if not greater drop in wellbeing than unemployment.
No government has yet taken the next step of reshaping its policies to promote happiness, but clear patterns reveal that low taxes, freedom of speech and equality are good for wellbeing.
Listening to your favorite melodies and harmonies can trigger the brain to release large amounts of dopamine, a chemical that sends “feel good” signals to the rest of the body.
Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton revolutionized the modern world through scientific advance; these very different men had one thing in common: an unshakable belief in God.
That chronic pain and depression are so often bound together suggests a complex relationship, and the brain’s shared circuitry for social and physical pain may lie at its heart.
Sexual harassment may have become so commonplace for women that they have built up resistance to harassing behavior they consider merely “bothersome,” suggests a new study.
Research conducted by Arizona State University anthropologists finds an increasing number of societies express negative attitudes towards overweight individuals—a reversal of earlier trends.
Potentially dangerous food coloring has been removed from foods made by American companies—overseas. The coloring persists in the U.S. while the F.D.A. calls for more research.
China, the world’s largest consumer of cigarettes, is having another crack at kicking the habit. The Chinese government has announced it will ban smoking in enclosed public venues from May.
People who eat candy and chocolate tend to have smaller waists, weigh less and have a lower body mass index than those who don’t indulge in these treats, a new study says.
Scientists at New York University have combined two methods that scientists use to carry D.N.A. into cell nuclei. The result could help analyze proteins and ultimately improve gene therapy.
For decades, medicine has been dominated by independent doctors who owned their practices and worked night and day—today this is changing, along with the very concept of patient care.
New genomic analyses suggest that the most common genetic variants in the human genome aren’t the ones most likely causing disease, genetic experts at Duke University Medical Center report.
As African temperature zones shift due to global warming, tropical diseases like malaria are affecting new populations—lack of previous exposure means lower immunity rates.