Technology & Innovation — September 11, 2009

Big Think Sits Down With Nestle’s Chairman

Tucked away on the north shore of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva is a town called Vevey. It’s home to Nestle’s headquarters, as well as its former CEO and now Chairman Peter Brabeck. We were lucky enough to catch up with him a couple weeks ago. The story of how Brabeck came to spend 40 years at Nestle is a peculiar one. For a while, he didn’t even realize he was employed by the food giant- he thought he was just selling ice cream! For someone who started skiing at age two and hasn’t stopped, life has been full of adventures. Perhaps most interestingly, we had a chance to delve into Brabeck’s true passion, one that rarely comes up at your average American dinner table: the water crisis. He’s convinced we’ll run out of it before we run out of oil. His idea for a remedy? Water simply cannot be free.

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.

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