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Why You Need a Time Machine: Dr. Kaku Explains String Theory
Editor’s Note: Over the next 12 days, Big Think will be running excerpts from all the lessons that make up our first online course, Great Big Ideas. During this period, we are offering discounted...
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Do You Have the Moral Compass of a Toddler?
What’s the Big Idea? Are we born with a sense of morality? Or is ethical awareness something we arrive at only as we age? Like nature versus nurture, this is a question so loaded it’s become a...
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Moving a Cemetery: How to Drag Higher Education into the 21 Century
Our university system is bloated, inefficient, too expensive, and increasingly out-of-sync with a digital society and global economy. Dr. Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and...
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Virtual Reality Contact Lenses Are One Step Closer to Reality
As Dr. Michio Kaku has been predicting for years, we are inching ever closer to producing virtual reality contact lenses that will add a layer of interactive, rich information over our mundane visual...
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Life’s Too Short: How to Read the Right Books
Let’s say you’re in the top fifth percentile of avid readers, tearing through a book a week on average. With such literary gusto raising your sails, you might feel like the entire world is an open book...
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Paul Ryan, Individual Liberty, and the Fate of Medicare
Just as Mitt Romney appears to be wrapping up the Republican nomination for the presidency, congressional Republicans are taking steps to set up their own political framework for the 2012 election. In...
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FU Asks: Should the Government Fund the Arts?
Welcome to a new feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we’re featuring a discussion...
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Obama’s Budget Priorities: Can We Compete with China and India?
President Obama has unveiled his proposed 10-year budget today, and while there’s nothing particularly shocking included for those who have been following the ongoing debate between the White House and...
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Disrupting Education: There Are No Boundaries to Knowledge Anymore
It used to be that if you went to an elite school you didn’t have access to the best minds unless you were physically in their presence. That is not the case anymore, Big Think co-founder and CEO...
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Language Pragmatics: Why We Can’t Talk to Computers
Speech recognition technology continues to fascinate language and cognitive science researchers, and Apple’s introduction of the Siri voice assistant program in its recent iPhone 4S was heralded by...
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William Ackman on the Psychology of the Successful Investor
Following the meltdown of the financial system in 2008, subsequent economic downturn, innumerable investigative journalism pieces about the big banks and investment practices, and finally the rise of...
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Tweet to Win VIP Seats at the New York Public Library’s Floating University...
We here at the Floating University are excited to announce a promotion for our LIVE event next week at the New York Public Library: Anyone who follows us on Twitter (@FloatingU) and sends us an @ reply...
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Frankenmeat: Growing a Burger in a Petri Dish
Using human stem cells to tackle human health issues remains controversial in the United States, but a team of Dutch researchers has found a potentially crowd-pleasing application of stem cell...
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What is Art? Join the Floating University at the New York Public Library...
It is one of the most debated subjects of all time: What is art? Some might think it doesn’t much matter whether or not consensus is achieved on this highly subjective topic, but the definition of art...
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FU Asks: Why Did Economists Drop the Ball on the Housing Bubble?
Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we’re featuring a...
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Primate Vices: What Monkey Pornography and Celebrity Worship Tells Us About...
Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus macaques has added...
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Larry Summers on the Rise of China and India
The United States is entering uncharted waters as a superpower, as it slowly climbs out of a crippling recession and faces an electoral showdown this fall between cautious globalism and a desire to...
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FU Asks: How Would You Invest $100,000?
Welcome to an ongoing feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we’re featuring a...
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WATCH: When Ideas Have Authority, We Learn, Profit, and Grow
We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think: It’s some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web. Technology has been changing how knowledge...
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WATCH: How We Speak Reveals What We Think, with Steven Pinker
We’re thrilled to be bringing The Floating University to Big Think: It’s some of the most vital, timely, and mind-changing video content anywhere on the Web. Technology has been changing how knowledge...
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