Life & Death
-
What's the Latest Development? For individuals with no assets and no family, the possibility of being committed to a Federal prison may be more promising than landing in a government-funded nursing home. Prison, after all, is not without certain benefits: "Prison is cheap (if not free), provides ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? With the passing of celebrities like Adam Yauch, Maurice Sendak and Dona Summer, the public's grieving process has increasingly taken place in plain view, particularly on social media sites like Twitter. The 140-letter dirge, however, typically conveys a more ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes argues that the persistence of our online profiles after our physical death makes us immortal in a very meaningful sense. If our fear of death is not limited to the extinction of our physical being, but extends to include our ... Read More
-
What's the Big Idea? Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic ... Read More
-
Today we're pleased to announce our second Big Think Book of the Month, the dazzlingly ambitious Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism , out May 22, 2012 from Verso Books. Slavoj Žižek has been called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" for his analysis of ... Read More
-
The blind 40-year-old Chinese dissident who escaped from house arrest in April — improbably evading guards, finding his way to the U.S. embassy in Beijing and, after a diplomatic fracas, acquiring a visa to study law in the United States — landed at Newark Liberty airport on Saturday. Less than a ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? Yale philosophy professor Shelly Kagan is pretty sure death is a bad for a person but he can't put his finger on the precise reason. Take these two different scenarios: (1) Your friend is about to begin a 100 year space mission and, even more dramatic, radio ... Read More
-
Medic Mobile integrates technologies to connect and train health systems. The company uses technologies such as FrontlineSMS, OpenMRS, Ushahidi, Google Apps, and HealthMap to allow healthcare workers to communicate with each other using only $15 phones. Their SIM apps allow large groups of ... Read More
-
The goal of the Bing Humanizing Technology Expo – which will culminate in June, 2012 with a live event and prize ceremony in New York City – is to identify new technologies that integrate themselves seamlessly into our lives, capitalize on our unique strengths, and amplify the best of human nature. Nominees will fall into one of three categories – 1) Self Help: Self-reflection, personal advancement and confidence building. 2) Human Relationships: Family, Friendship, and Love. 3) Safety & Security: personal, financial, and national security. Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? Using a completely new approach to cancer treatment, British scientists have used stem cells to shield the body's bone marrow, which is especially vulnerable to chemotherapy, against the indiscriminate treatment. As a result of chemotherapy, a patient's bone marrow ... Read More
-
Jason Silva is an optimist. With a capital O. His optimism hits you full force the moment you meet him – the broad, beaming grin, the reassuring handshake . . . no, before that, in the form of multiple enthusiastic exclamation points in his every email. More specifically, he’s optimistic about the ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? As we discover more planets outside our solar system and more terrestrial life that survives the most brutal of conditions, many are increasingly dissatisfied with the view that life as we know it is the limit of nature's genius. But what would a completely new ... Read More
-
The cover headline caught my eye, and I surprised both the elderly leafletter and myself when I took a copy of the “Watchtower” magazine on my way out of the subway station this morning. Religion and politics is one of my favorite subjects. What do the Jehovah’s Witnesses have to say? What ... Read More
-
The troubling chronicle of blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has me thinking about the trial of another dissident who faced a life-changing dilemma of his own 2411 years ago in ancient Athens. Chen, like Socrates, is a gadfly on the hide of his polity. Where Socrates was condemned for ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? A team of psychologists hypothesized that people would cling harder to their belief systems when confronted with the disturbing fact of their own mortality. To test their theory, the team asked different law court judges to deliver a ruling in a hypothetical case ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? Nanotechnology which allows anti-cancer drugs to target specific tumor cells has shown early success in human trials. In tests conducted by Bind Biosciences in Cambridge, MA, "multiple lung metastases shrank or even disappeared after one patient received only two ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? When it comes to maintaining a healthy brain into old age, what you do in your later years is more important than how you lived your youth, according to new scientific evidence just published in Trends in Cognitive Science. "Engagement is the secret to success ... Read More
-
What matters in life? Will Wilkinson wrote wrote a nice Big Think post on Friday quoting some recent psychological research and suggesting the answer is “memorable social experience”: A number of recent studies bear out the idea that spending on experience is more likely to boost ... Read More
-
What's the Latest Development? A study of more than 200,000 Australians found that people who sat more than 11 hours a day had a 40% higher risk of dying in the next three years than people who sat less than four hours a day. "This was after adjusting for factors such as age, weight, physical ... Read More
