Culture & Religion — February 2, 2011

Is Google the Future of Art?

The Google Art Project offers a new form of collaboration that allows museums to take extraordinary art works beyond their individual homes to create the first global art collection.

bigthinkeditor

Whether you’re in an internet café in São Paolo looking at the brushwork in Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night, which is normally found on display at MoMA in New York, or at home in Cleveland, exploring the surface of the British National Gallery’s Holbein painting The Ambassadors, you’ll find a different level of detail in viewing art online with this project, and new, virtual ways of exploring gallery spaces that dramatically change the experience of learning about great works of art.

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Surprising Science

Emulating Nature in the Lab

Nature is smart, efficient and innovative. That’s why scientists and engineers all over the world try to copy it in their labs. The field concerned with imitating nature is called biomimetics.