Professional women are at a disadvantage due to what's called "the confidence gap," an idea popularized by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay. Shine is a new company that seeks to close that gap one text message at a time.

Democracy is happening like never before, and it's exploiting our deepest fears and failures.

“If the election for U.S. president were held today, who would you vote for?” Response options included all of the Republican and Democratic candidates in the race at the time, along with options for “Other” and “I would not vote.”

Wading into the gun control debate, Facebook has announced it will restrict person-to-person sales of firearms on its platform.

On the map, the changing fortunes of French baby boys' names look like battles in a weird, unreported war. 

The similarities between the Universe and a living being are striking and surprising. Could larger entities than us be alive? “Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to […]

The essence of comedy is being critical, says John Cleese, and that means causing offense sometimes. But we shouldn't protect everyone from experiencing negative emotions by enforcing political correctness.

Our mobile devices provide so much stimulation that they capture our entire attention, even when we're with other people in social situations. Smartphones isolate us; ironically, they rob us of true solitude.

Big Think's Jason Gots reviews David McCullough's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography John Adams. 

How "the stats" are being used often causes a fog of low-quality quantification. Multiple regression is widely misunderstood by researchers and journalists.     

To describe humans as innately selfish creatures (a) misunderstands some of our most important scientific and evolutionary theories and (b) is empirically false. A person's first impulse is generally toward generosity, not meanness.

As the world works toward a zero-emission economy, Japan has had to get creative about building up its solar infrastructure.

New research shows that the most effective leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Jeff Bezos, are always questioning their own convictions. 

An unfamiliar new threat that harms babies, that we can't protect ourselves from, that experts don't fully understand, and about which the media is blaring loud alarms; Zika virus has several powerful emotional characteristics that make any potential danger feel much more dangerous than it might actually be.

When presidential debates become a media circus, it's the voters who lose. But an alternative debate format would eliminate the kind of candidate-moderator feud that is dominating our political moment.

Chinese activist Ai Weiwei is the most political artist on Earth. Did he just sell his soul to a department store?

And how close does the farthest one we’ve ever found so far come to it? “Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics […]

For most of his adult life, George Takei had to hide his sexuality to protect his career as an actor. He came out when he was 68 years old and, contrary to his fears, his work and his life have since blossomed.

Planet Nine? More like “Planet maybe.” “Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.” –Mike Brown Last week, the […]

Out of those hundreds of friends on Facebook, you'd only count four of them as "true friends."