Search
Latest Articles
The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
Here’s a nice thought to start the day: the natural world operates through an endless exchange of life and death. The ecosystem, and all of the organisms it houses, squeezes […]
Media’s big guys generally aren’t doing so well, but as last week’s State of the News Media report found, community and ethnic media continued to grow despite the economic downturn. […]
It’s a truth universally acknowledged around the world that education is good. The higher a people’s schooling, goes the mantra, the better its economic progress, political prospects and gender equality. […]
As Churchill said of democracy (“the worst form of government excepting those already tried,” to paraphrase), so historians might say of marriage—or at least, marriage as conceived in the late […]
Whatever you think of the bill itself, last night’s passage of health care reform is a major achievement for the Democrats. Both Republican and Democratic Congresses have tried to reform […]
I would put Albert Einstein among the 20 top people who have ever lived, in terms of their impact on our way of life. Kings, queens, and emperors have come […]
Last night, House Democrats passed comprehensive health care reform legislation. After decades of fruitless struggle, the U.S. is finally poised to extend insurance to 32 million people and curb the […]
2mins
The real issue is not whether we can prove that climate change will or will not occur within 30 years. It’s that we don’t really know for sure, but we […]
1mins
In energy technology, it’s clear if your invention works or not. Either the device saves energy and people buy it and find out, or it doesn’t.
4mins
The reason we haven’t innovated enough in energy technology is because energy used to be cheap.
7mins
A process that mimics photosynthesis could create a fuel that provides energy in a convenient form.
6mins
“When carbon dioxide is free to emit, we emit it like it ain’t going out of style.”
5mins
If we are going to cut carbon emissions by 90 percent from their levels in the 1990s, we’re going to have to make a lot more clean energy than you […]
5mins
The interplay between the dead and the living—the miraculous “webbing of nature in which death becomes life and life becomes death…around and around”—not only stands as the basis of our […]
10mins
Mammals, including humans, have natural lifespans that have remained about the same through each species’ existence. What are these figures, and why do they vary so greatly across species?
6mins
From our tiniest cells performing constant “suicide programs,” to the adaptive measures behind the grand sweep of evolutionary history, death is what truly drives life.
4mins
Humans have developed elaborate rituals, institutions and even theories of immortality to lessen the life-long shock that is knowledge of death. What’s behind this primal urge and how does an […]
2mins
Our atoms are formed from particles with seemingly infinite lifespans, so why do organisms die? The NYU professor explains the biology of death.
27mins
A conversation with the author and professor of biology at New York University.
“This is what change looks like,” remarked US President Barack Obama moments after the final House vote passed his universal health care legislation in an historic victory.