Americans continue to believe in race—“kind of like [how] people believe in witches,” says Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter. Yet the concept of race as we know it didn’t develop […]

Finally, someone has taken the (necessary) contrarian view: Tiger’s nothing new. Furthermore, his public “shaming” and highly planned apologies are products, like tennis shoes–ones we might consider feeling shame ourselves […]

A study says that the lives of 900 American babies — as well as $13 billion — could be saved each year if their mothers simply continued to breastfeed them through their first six months of life.

An amber deposit found in Ethiopia includes the fossilized remains of Cretaceous era ants, spiders, wasps, and bacteria, and is providing new information about how those species lived.

Research suggests that a gigantic network of offshore wind power stations along the Eastern seaboard could potentially provide energy to a large swath of the U.S. without much threat of outages.

The burgeoning field of animal personality research seeks to figure out why individual members of a species are so unique — and why they remain so through their entire lives.

Glen Whitman writes that economic interventions by policymakers to address anomalies in human behavior "create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism."

About 4.4% of American adults are believed to have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and more and more of them are being diagnosed and treated with medication.

Yassin Musharbash writes that banning women from wearing burqas won't solve the underlying problems of Muslim immigration and integration that plague Western societies.

A team of researchers are hoping to find 30,000 years of climate records in the rings of preserved kauri trees in the peat bogs of New Zealand.

With tenure-track positions dwindling at universities, Peter Conn writes that humanities faculties need to "articulate our contribution if we hope to find increasing levels of support for the work we do."

As many as thirty percent of Americans have allergies, and most of the pollen they are affected by comes from trees planted nearby. Cities could relieve sufferers by planting low-pollen street trees.

To solve the transportation problem in a city, put everything online. Publishing raw data would enable people to run simulations and create proposals.

Michael Schrage would rather invest in a counterpart of Ryanair, than in fixed track locations: “It may work for Asia and Europe, but people are closer together, the city densities […]

The role of the federal government should be to facilitate opportunity and choice for people who wish to travel.

“I don’t believe people are going to give up on the wheels of a car for the foreseeable future,” says the transportation researcher.

Bestselling cookbook author and New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman stopped by the Big Think offices a few weeks ago to talk with us about eating, cooking, and the […]

At the New York Review of Books Blog, controversial Catholic theologian Hans Küng blames the celibate priesthood for the epidemic of child rape in the Catholic Church. (The term “rape” […]

The price improvement curve ahead of us for space travel could improve from $45 million to $100, says Peter Diamandis.