bigthinkeditor

Was Rolling Stone’s psy-ops exclusive a “cautionary tale about people doing something they are not trained for and the media commenting on something they know little to nothing about?”

Comparative cognition expert Laurie Santos’ research with capuchin monkeys shows that we both fall prey to the same irrational economic tendencies.

A new ‘dementia map’ of the UK suggests six out of ten cases go undiagnosed, leaving families without the support they badly need.

Talk to the workers who are hurting most in this epic downturn, and you’ll find they are overwhelmingly out there on their own. No one has their back. Which is why unions matter.

Scientists can’t definitively say why some cells become cancerous, but an even bigger mystery is why some cancer cells spontaneously regress and even disappear on their own.

Oil markets don’t like surprises. The sudden ousting of Mr. Mubarak and the unrest in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran and Algeria had added 20% to oil prices by the middle of last week.

Contributing to the uprisings across the Middle East is the suppression of democratic aspirations by authoritarian regimes. Important too is the dangerous state of the region’s economies.rn

From WikiLeaks to Guantanamo Bay, legal challenges present false threats to America’s unquestionable military dominance, says University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner.

Oxford professor of economics Paul Collier says the biggest challenge facing Africa today is to reign in corruption during what is sure to be an era of massive resource extraction.

Journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington clinched an Oscar nomination for their documentary “Restrepo,” in which they show the Afghanistan war through the eyes of soldiers.

Ever since Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, scientists have wondered whether the process still applies to humans. At some point, did we stop evolving?

American’s mediocre placement in the world of standardized tests has little to do with the popular notion of its present decline—the golden age of American education simply never was.

Although mainstream media have devoted few resources to covering the collective bargaining battle in Wisconsin, it is alive and well—police have recently taken the side of the protesters.

The newest geological time period—called the Anthropocene—is gaining recognition. It defines our industrialized era in which humans will indelibly mark the earth’s physical profile.

In the space of a month, the centre of gravity in the world has shifted back to the Middle—to Egypt and other young societies across the Middle East and North Africa, says history professor Mark Levine.

Britain’s former prime minister made two unannounced calls to Colonel Gaddafi on Friday and asked him to stop killing protesters rising up against the regime.

Is it a coincidence that the Wall Street bankers responsible for the market crash were men, or do aggressive risk-taking strategies befall the male gender more naturally?

“I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,” Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Author Jim Hold asks if those of us with computers are really better off?

Civil resistance usually cannot survive systematic and violent repression, and it is still often suppressed by authoritarian governments. At least in the Arab world, this seems to be changing.

Many of this year’s top movies portray dark themes or flawed characters. One culture watcher says they mirror this moment in history where anti-heroes are the more common stock.

Biologist and popular author Richard Dawkins says that human intelligence is undervalued these days. We must do away with rulebooks and start trusting our own judgment, he says.

Abraham Verghese, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, offers surprising reasons for why C.T. scans should not replace the ritual of doctors examining patients’ bodies.

Context, oblique cultural allusions, metaphors and so on are par for the course in human-to-human conversation, but entirely beyond machines, says a Turing Test participant.

When the brain juggles two—or more—languages, there are positive consequences for the brain, says Ellen Bialystok, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto.

Simple marketing strategies can be very effective at getting kids to eat healthier lunches, like putting fruit in an attractive bowl and replacing carrots with ‘x-ray vision carrots’.

Putting on a bright face at work could leave you feeling miserable. Workers who fake a smile to keep their customers and colleagues happy could be making themselves depressed.

Rolling Stone magazine caused turmoil in the U.S. military this week reporting that a commander in Afghanistan ordered a “psychological operations” team to manipulate U.S. senators.

The notion that science and religion are at war is one of the great dogmas of the present age. However, the views of many scientists turn out to be less rigidly doctrinaire than suspected.

A new book looking back on The Feminine Mystique explains why Betty Friedan might have paved the way for equal marriages by blowing the roof off male-dominated couplings.

We all know that women like funny guys but empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been sorely lacking. Fortunately, a recent study tests whether humor helps men pick up women.