What's the Latest Development? Tokyo-based construction company Taisei has developed a demolition system for tall buildings that they say is cleaner and more environmentally friendly than traditional and more destructive methods. It works from the top down by using huge jacks to support and ...

        Humans are blessed, and cursed, with a risk perception system that mostly gets things right, but sometimes creates what I call a Risk Perception Gap, when we worry more than the evidence warrants, or less than the evidence warns. Such seemingly irrational fears, which produce all sorts of ...

If the magician, comedian and outspoken atheist Penn Jillette had one question for God, what would it be? "Just how hip are you?" Jillette asked in a recent Big Think interview, addressing God directly. He expanded on this question as such: What kind of super hip, surrealist, ultra ...

In an e-mail conversation I had some time ago, a Christian minister attempted to convince me that atheists, despite what they might say, live life on the basis of faith in the same way that Christians do: The life of faith is not completely irrational, nor is the life of rationality without ...

On Monday, I suggested that Justice Thomas might build on his first moment of non-silence in seven years.  “If he wants to demonstrate that he takes his judicial role seriously with landmark decisions looming,” I wrote, “Justice Thomas should consider asking a question now and then” during Supreme ...

In October the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a scathing report identifying Lance Armstrong as the ruthlessly-driven mastermind of a 10-year doping scheme. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and an inspiration to millions, was shown to be deceitful, manipulative and remorseless -- many of the telltale ...

Congress created the debt ceiling crisis almost entirely on its own. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress what’s known as the “the power of the purse”: Congress alone can authorize spending, collect taxes, borrow money, or print money. The president can propose a budget, but it’s Congress ...

Long before Allen Ginsberg used the phrase ‘first thought, best thought’ to describe spontaneous, intuitive writing that seemed to spring unaware from ‘somewhere else,’ Buddhists had developed this maxim as a sort of cognitive umbilical cord to the unconscious. The underlying idea is that the first ...

When the new BiblioTech library opens in San Antonio, Texas later this year, it will become the nation's first "bookless public library" -- everything is going to be digital, the library will rent out e-readers like Kindles and iPads, and the whole look and feel of the place will be based on the ...

          Have you read the 2008 Supreme Court decision that gives all Americans the right to own guns? Probably not. I hadn’t, until the other day, when I was stunned to find that the decision is hardly the blanket protection for gun ownership that the National Rifle Association and adamant gun ...

What happens when you ban a book? Sales increase. The modern maxim that any press is good press is true. If you really want people to read a book, tell them it’s extremely offensive; books that offend are difficult to ignore, just like provocative secrets are difficult to conceal - both spread ...

Last Friday Aaron Swartz committed suicide, shortly before his Federal trial was due to begin. According to the US Attorney’s press release, “if convicted on these charges, SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a ...