The Latest from Big Think

As I wrote last year in a chapter at the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change & Society, the imagined public relative to climate change remains a source of ever growing anxiety […]

"Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds how you thought news would look and sound in 2012?" joked Jon Stewart on a recent episode of […]

Once again, I've gotten enmeshed in a debate on Twitter. This time it wasn't with a theist, but with two atheists, Daniel Loxton and Reed Esau. It started with these […]

That's the bold prediction of Kristian Hammond, an executive at Narrative Science, a company that translates data into natural language. He predicts a robot will win the Pulitzer in five years.

Despite predictions to the contrary, Intel has developed a new computer chip which fits more transistors into a smaller space. Computer power is still looking set to increase into the future. 

There’s a universal truth in the online world. Scan the discussion pages of any article featuring the words Apple or Android and the comments page will be a battleground for […]

My latest column is now up on AlterNet, Apocalypse Soon: Why Are Christians So Obsessed With the End Times? In it, I trace the long and ignoble history of failed […]

As I've been writing about for the past several years, the key to public engagement on climate change is to tell personally relevant stories about the issue.  An effective method […]

GPS technology is opening up exciting new hybrid forms of mapping and art. Or in this case: cycling, mapping and art. The maps on this page are the product of […]

Bryan Sykes is the author of DNA USA, which documents his journey across America, Easy Rider style, as he describes it, to record a genetic portrait of the nation. What […]

According to Dr. Mark Hyman, we’re at a watershed moment in science and medicine in which we need to learn how to change the environment around us in order to create the "best expression of our genes." 

While scientists jump to answer this notoriously difficult question, scientific observation is not well suited to finding the cosmic will that the question implies. This stumper is better left alone.

It’s commonplace to imagine the people of the period we know now as the High Renaissance, centered in Italy from the 1490s to the 1520s, looking at the works of […]

The NAO is a fully programmable, 57cm humanoid robot made by Alderaban Robotics. This cute robot contains a full array of body language, text and visual recognition, as well as […]

Pamela Haag: "Whenever I hear a headline like 'Marriage Ruined by Cheating,' I’m tempted to point to a divorce somewhere else and declare, 'Marriage Ruined by Monogamy.'

While talk of mining near-Earth asteroids has concentrated on metals like gold and platinum, the real treasure may be mining water and using its hydrogen to propel ambitious space missions. 

Throughout the history of our solar system, the sun's proximity to exploding supernovae has had an important influence on the development of life on Earth, says a new study out of Denmark. 

In 1962, the latest and greatest form of artificial illumination was invented; the light emitting diode (LED).  In recent years, they have reached a level of illumination suitable for most applications of indoor lighting.

The private space company Sierra Nevada has designed a spacecraft to take the place of NASA's recently retired shuttles, carrying astronauts to the ISS with greater efficiency. 

As Silicon Valley startups race to develop the next generation of sophisticated, algorithmic marketing software, it’s instructive to note the success of Thinkmodo – a viral marketing firm that films all its videos on iphones, does no market testing, and doesn’t even mention the name of the product in its campaigns.