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Although mainstream media have devoted few resources to covering the collective bargaining battle in Wisconsin, it is alive and well—police have recently taken the side of the protesters.

The newest geological time period—called the Anthropocene—is gaining recognition. It defines our industrialized era in which humans will indelibly mark the earth’s physical profile.

In the space of a month, the centre of gravity in the world has shifted back to the Middle—to Egypt and other young societies across the Middle East and North Africa, says history professor Mark Levine.

In 1803 the U.S. negotiated probably the best real estate deal in history, taking advantage of Napoleon’s need for cash to fund his European expansion.

Britain’s former prime minister made two unannounced calls to Colonel Gaddafi on Friday and asked him to stop killing protesters rising up against the regime.

“I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,” Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Author Jim Hold asks if those of us with computers are really better off?

Civil resistance usually cannot survive systematic and violent repression, and it is still often suppressed by authoritarian governments. At least in the Arab world, this seems to be changing.

The notion that science and religion are at war is one of the great dogmas of the present age. However, the views of many scientists turn out to be less rigidly doctrinaire than suspected.

We all know that women like funny guys but empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been sorely lacking. Fortunately, a recent study tests whether humor helps men pick up women.

Defense Secretary Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan.

Starting your own business often means going it alone on health insurance—a risky prospect for any individual, let alone a family. Reform will encourage entrepreneurs, says Ezra Klein.

Lawrence Principe of Johns Hopkins University wants to rehabilitate alchemy. He believes that most alchemists were respectable knowledge seekers working with well constructed theories.

The security afforded by having a government job is worth approximately a pay increase of 15%, says Art Carden. This should inform the debate over collective bargaining in Madison.

This Big Think special series looks at what taste actually is—from both a scientific and sociological perspective—and why it is that we find some tastes so appealing and others disgusting.

Lionel Jensen, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, addresses the claim that Chinese currency manipulation is at the heart of America’s fiscal woes.

When combat veterans tell their battle tales, the stories often are laced with themes of heroism, sacrifice and loyalty. But guilt also takes a heavy mental toll.

Twitter and Facebook may be the civil uprising tools du jour, but they certainly weren’t the first. Photography galvanized support for the African American Civil Rights movement.

The conventional wisdom that all growth is good is not based on real science, empirical data, or business reality.

The hip hop mogul doesn’t like bosses, and therefore looks to hire people who like to get their hands dirty.

By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded—may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge.

Squatting empty buildings is not a criminal offence. It is, in fact, an ancient right, a tradition that can be traced back over centuries of popular dissent and pragmatism.

Over the last month, we’ve seen that social media can be a powerful tool in assisting revolutions in countries. But can those media be useful in empowering corporate revolutions?

With the emergence of new tools that can measure a person’s biological state, computer interfaces are starting to take users’ feelings into account, helping the user to focus.

The physicist and comic book enthusiast outlines technologies that were once imagined by science fiction writers that have now found social utility.

Medical science has developed a greater awareness of the link between hormonal changes and cancer. Could this information explain not just why we get the disease, but when?

Medical science is no longer in the dark about how certain cancers are able to stage a comeback. But shedding light on the cancer stem cell theory has forced us […]

The previous director of the National Cancer Institute wanted to banish suffering and death from cancer by 2015. Current director Harold Varmus says this claim was not based on reality, […]

Seemingly every year there are new reports that something we consume or use on a daily basis is carcinogenic. But what exactly does that mean on a biological level?