bigthinkeditor
N.A.S.A.’s Messenger spacecraft, which entered orbit around Mercury on March 17, sent its first images of the hot planet’s surface, including its previously unseen southern pole, back to Earth.
British research aimed at helping farmers cut their contribution to climate change shows how to reduce the amount of methane produced by cows and sheep belching and breaking wind.
Mental health remains a huge concern for the space industry, whether considering humanity’s eventual colonization of other worlds or merely the price of a space tourism weekend.
Amazon getting the jump on Google and Apple with the launch of its digital music locker service has prompted closer looks at legality and whether licenses should be paid for streaming.
The human heartbeat could be used to power an ipod after scientists developed a tiny chip which uses the body’s own movement to generate power, the Telegraph reports.
Should more be done to limit companies like Apple from staking claims to generic words and phrases? What’s the harm in this kind of appropriation of language?
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. Charles Arthur looks at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology and users reveal how their work lives changed.
What if the most innovative kids’ property today was not a TV show, but a website? For Aardman Animations’ head of broadcast, Moshi Monsters leads the way.
Why and how online ad sites need to catch up in terms of aesthetics and usability. They should integrate social recommendations and filter the chaos, for starters.
Mobile apps will get most traction in HR’s workforce management — time and attendance and absence management — perfectly meeting the needs of a distributed, mobile workforce.
The CD and the physical newspaper are now Nero playing the fiddle. They are viewed as the mountains that can’t move on the horizon: omnipresent, and sacred. But they shouldn’t be.
Traditional media advertising remains a more effective driver of online traffic than the social networking equivalent, a multimarket study has found.
Do Not Track allows us to veto tracking by third parties, who are welcome to respond by offering cash-for-data. It creates a market mechanism for negotiating over privacy preferences.
Big Think spoke to The New York Times chief theater critic, Ben Brantley, about the present and future state of journalism and online criticism.
As Europe takes the lead on the Libyan intervention, it’s a powerful signal of America’s weakening global influence. Peter Beinart on Obama’s Jeffersonian turn—and the end of an empire.
As Middle East regimes try to stifle dissent by censoring the Internet, the U.S. faces an uncomfortable reality: its companies provide much of the technology used to block websites.
Germany and Pakistan may be apples and oranges, but the point is that the current artistic and creative ferment in Pakistan is not sustainable, just as the Weimar Republic fell to fascism.
Forbes’ Gordon Chang echoes American politicians’ calling for military intervention in Syria. Our foreign policy interests are at stake, he says, and it’s not worth waiting for international consensus.
An Amnesty International reports says that while opposition to the death penalty has gained much global support, powerful countries like the U.S. and China continue to execute convicts.
As the world rallies behind the Libyan population, it is hard to understand why the Ivory Coast—where civil war is brewing—is just a footnote in international news and on the diplomatic agenda.
An E.U. bailout of Portugal now seems inevitable. But at some point, E.U. taxpayers are likely to tire of bailing out nations like Portugal, which seem unwilling to curb their spendthrift ways.
By day, Aleksei N. Navalny is a lawyer in Moscow. By night, he runs a website that exposes corruption in the Russian energy sector. A friend of the people, he is making government enemies.
Analysts in the U.S. and Europe did not expect revolutions in the Arab world, and those who did, did not expect them to come from such unlikely actors or be this widespread and peaceful.
Three of the world’s great armies have suddenly conspired to support a group of people in the coastal cities of Libya, known, vaguely, as “the rebels”. But what do we really know about them?
People who experience the “impostor phenomenon” believe their successes are undeserved—and they live in constant fear of being unmasked despite consistently good performance.
Two psychology researchers at Wilfrid Laurier University say they have come up with a simple test that reveals whether two friends will have a tempestuous relatoinship or not.
If you think you determine the course of your life, you’re more likely to work harder toward your goals. If you think you don’t, you’re likelier to behave in ways that fulfill that prophesy.
Scientists report in a new study that a male mouse’s desire to mate with either a male or a female is determined by the brain chemical serotonin, which regulates other sexual behaviors.
Researchers studying the most ancient yet least understood of the five senses—smell—have discovered a previously unknown step in how odors are detected and processed by the brain.
With the increasing cost of health care and the constant threat of litigation, doctors and hospitals are under enormous pressure to keep patients and their families happy.