Big Think (videos of the past month: 01/31-02/28/17)

source: Big Think
4:54 How Astronomy Has Opened the Gates to Humanity’s Greatest Inventions | Alex Filippenko What’s so great about astronomy? Where does Professor Alex Filippenko begin. This branch of science is important for two salient reasons: it captures the attention of children who then grow up to b...
4:02 Artificial Cognification: In the Future Everything Will Be Smart | Kevin Kelly If an object has a battery in it or a plug at the end of it, it won’t be long before that item is intelligent – although Kevin Kelly, the founder editor of WIRED, questions whether intelligence is ...
3:18 Political Comedy In 2017: It's Amateur Hour | Josh Lieb What’s that smell? It’s political humor in 2017, according to Josh Lieb, former producer and writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “There's always a temptation in comedy to go for the low han...
4:43 'Hey Bill Nye, What If the World Were Run by Scientists and Engineers?' Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/bill-nye-votes-science-2020
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4:17 Brain Science: Optogenetics and Expansion Microscopy | Ed Boyden Despite library shelves sagging under the weight of neurology books, what we know about the brain so far is unfledged. MIT professor Edward Boyden explains how research teams are using expansion mi...
4:06 The Science of Navy SEAL Superlearning | Jamie Wheal How long would it take you to master a new language? A year? 18 months? Longer? For a special operator in the elite Navy SEAL Team 6 it used to take six months of study, but thanks to a combination...
4:59 Malaria: How Do You Eradicate an Infectious Disease With No Vaccine? | Philip Eckhoff Nearly 500,000 people die every year from malaria – an awful amount, but one that has come down from one million deaths per year. Philip Eckhoff, Senior Director of Research at the Institute for Di...
3:29 How We Chase Dopamine: Porn, Social Media, and Alcohol | Steven Kotler What really fuels the economy? It’s not trade, free spending, or good old-fashioned elbow grease – it’s something much smaller and harder to see: dopamine. Along with high-performance expert Jamie ...
4:40 Jeffrey Sachs on Trump's Economics: Populism Won't Save the Rust Belt The Rust Belt was promised a lot this election – will those promises, which are now transitioning into policies, be made good? Economist and UN advisor Jeffrey Sachs is a Rust Belt native himself, ...

3:49 Interior Mapping: Drone Deliveries, Emergency Rescue, and Smart Homes | Avideh Zakhor Avideh Zakhor, PhD, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley), and CEO/founder of Indoor Reality, a company whose hardware...
7:05 Daniel Dennett: Memes 101 | How Cultural Evolution Works We are what we are because of genes; we are who we are because of memes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett muses on an idea put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976. Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigth...
2:48 How Comedy Can Disarm Bullies | Scott Aukerman As long as you’re funny, it can get you out of almost anything – even getting mugged, as co-founder of Between Two Ferns Scott Aukerman recounts. Unfortunately, not everyone out there is funny, alt...
4:13 How a Math Algorithm Could Educate the Whole World — for Free | Po-Shen Loh Po-Shen Loh is a Princeton-educated mathematician, Carnegie Mellon professor, the head coach of the U.S. International Math Olympiad team, and now he’s adding start-up entrepreneur to his knock-out...
5:15 Can Universal Basic Income / Social Democracy Fix America’s Inequality? | Jeffrey Sachs Can't the U.S. be a little more like Scandinavia in its ethos? Fixing inequality in America will take more than economic reform, it will also need a cultural shift. From a human rights and decency ...
4:47 ‘Hey Bill Nye, Is Time Real?’ #TuesdaysWithBill Time is this wild fourth dimension in nature, says Bill Nye. We depend on its neat measurements for survival – but subjectively it continues to elude us .Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink...
4:54 Failing Fast Isn't Really Failure – It's Accelerated Learning | Astro Teller Astro Teller, the CEO aka ‘Captain of Moonshots’ of innovation factory X (formerly Google X) illuminates a critical difference: when undertaking a project, do you want to feel you’ve accomplished s...
6:46 How Human Consciousness Evolved | Daniel Dennett Daniel Dennett has been mulling consciousness over for the last 50 years, and he’s ended up where we began: evolution. When this theory was proposed by Darwin, it inverted everything people at the ...
7:10 Will Superhuman Intelligence Be Our Friend or Foe? | Ben Goertzel Let's just go ahead and address the question on everyone’s mind: will AI kill us? What is the negative potential of transhuman superintelligence? Once its cognitive power surpasses our own, will it...  

6:16 Tim Ferriss | Consider Risky Moves by ‘Fear-Setting' Goal setting is one thing, but how about 'fear setting'? Tim Ferriss encourages us to ask ourselves “What’s the worst that could happen?” – and not treat it rhetorically. Ferriss' latest book is "T...
3:48 Quantified Self: Your Digital Self-Help Mentor | Nichol Bradford Who knows more about you than anyone else? Perhaps it’s not so much who, but what. Our intimacy with our devices has surpassed our closeness with most of our friends and family, says Nichol Bradfor...
2:01 What Video Games Teach Us About U.S. Anti-Establishmentarianism | Nato Thompson What’s common to most movements of dissent, is that they don’t stay pure for long. Art curator and cultural critic Nato Thompson uses gaming to show how the anti-establishment ethos within those ga...  

4:55 'Hey Bill Nye, What If Life Had Evolved From Viruses?’ #TuesdaysWithBill Evolutionary biologists generally agree that humans evolved from a bacteria-like ancestor, rather than a viral one. But what if we're chemically connected? Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigth...  

5:00 Virtual Reality: The Biggest Tech Disruption in the Next 5 Years | Kevin Kelly Get a life? Soon it will be that simple, says Kevin Kelly. Five years from now, Kelly anticipates that most of us will have a physical reality and a virtual one – and the second will be as social a...
4:37 Artificial General Intelligence: Humanity's Last Invention | Ben Goertzel For all the talk of AI, it always seems that gossip is faster than progress. But it could be that within this century, we will fully realize the visions science fiction has promised us, says Dr. Be...  

2:50 Election Post-Mortem: How Everything Came Up Trump | Matt Taibbi How many lives does Donald Trump have, wonders political correspondent Matt Taibbi. Trump’s scandals and embarrassments on the campaign trail were enough to bury any normal politician several times...
5:18 The Most Dangerous Global Health Threats | Larry Brilliant The greatest global threats to health can be divided into two categories, explains epidemiologist and former head of philanthropy at Google, Dr. Larry Brilliant: there is the biological, and the so...
3:27 Militaristic or Moral: Do Governments Have to Choose? | Jelani Cobb America has a split personality, and the country it wants to be is constantly being foiled by the country that it is. In an ideal world, says Jelani Cobb, there is a way of using power that does no...
6:18 How Journalism Was Corrupted by the Power of Privilege | Gay Talese Journalists were once outsiders looking in, says Gay Talese, but today their proximity to Washington makes them myopic; they'd be wiser to disperse and keep their eyes on the horizon. Talese's most...
4:02 ‘Hey Bill Nye, What Technology Can We Expect to Have 50 Years From Now?’ #TuesdaysWithBill If we could jump 50 years into the future, what will our world look like? Flying cars? Hologram phones? Bill Nye sees two technological paths ahead – and we're in the fork between them at this very...