Big Think (videos of March 2017)

source: Big Think
4:41 Einstein's Gravity Waves: How Astronomers Proved Relativity's Key Prediction | Alex Filippenko Alex Filippenko is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. Whe...
4:36 Redefine Your Limits by Being Honest With Yourself | Kyle Maynard Why don’t we chase our dreams? What if everyone confronted the daily excuses they make for themselves? Innovation would explode around us. Life satisfaction would soar. Any yet we typically keep a ...
3:15 America’s Next Moonshot: Cut Poverty 50% by 2030 | Jeffrey Sachs on JFK's Optimism Optimism, as defined by economist Jeffrey Sachs, is more than just a translucent, faraway wish. It means having bold goals and acting on them—even if you have no plan or existing knowledge of how y...
2:53 Bill Nye on Climate Change: We Could Engineer Low-Methane Cows — or Eat Less Meat Make all the jokes you want, says Bill Nye, but methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and as Earth's population increases so too does the size of the meat industry that caters to it. Demand for ...
3:05 The Intelligence Revolution: Coupling AI and the Human Brain | Ed Boyden Edward Boyden is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. A pro...
5:34 Digital Addiction: How Half the Developed World Got Hooked on the Internet | Adam Alter It's not your screen you're addicted to — it's just the conduit for your high. NYU professor Adam Alter explains that behavioral addiction is similar to substance addiction: it feels good in the sh...
4:16 Big Bang Evidence: Frozen Higgs, Frozen Beer, and Gravity Waves | Lawrence Krauss It’s near impossible to comprehend the size of our universe without busting a mental cog or spraining your sense of awe. However, the origins of our universe has exactly the opposite problem: it wa...CC
4:49 Scientology Is the McDonalds of Religions | Louis Theroux What is the most quintessentially American religion? It would need to have celebrities, a Hollywood setting, big money, and a confusing swirl of innocence and the macabre. That's Scientology define...CC
3:01 Why There Is No Alternative to Publicly Funded Science Research | Avideh Zakhor Avideh Zakhor is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and recipient of the prestigious Hertz Foundation Grant for graduate study in the applications of the physical, biological and engineering sciences. Here,...CC
3:46 'Hey Bill Nye, Does Consciousness Transcend the Brain?' Consciousness is one of the big questions humanity longs to have answered. What makes us human? What is the experience of consciousness that we all feel exists intuitively, but that we have no evid...
2:21 How "Rude" New Yorkers Treated One Muslim Woman after Trump's Election | Amani Al-Khatahtbeh When she was nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh heard her first racial slur, from the mouth of one of her classmates. It was 2001, and 9/11 had just shocked and shattered the US's sense of safety.... CC
2:55 Political Correctness Unites People — in Hatred | Adam Mansbach, "Go the F*ck to Sleep" Political correctness has united us all—in hatred, says Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F*ck to Sleep. The principle of calling people by the names and pronouns that show them respect is valid, if ...CC
3:06 Thankfully, Everyone Poops: How a Smarter Toilet Could Save Millions of Lives | Philip Eckhoff In 2011, a research team featuring several Hertz Foundation Fellows received a grant to participate in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s ‘Reinvent the Toilet Challenge’. To bring sustainable sa...CC
5:20 Got Relationship Goals? Relational Thinking Is Your Launchpad | Esther Perel When you treat business relationships as perfunctory or shallow, the truth us, you lose. The dynamics between business partners are no different to the ones at play between romantic partners. Psych...CC
3:53 Anyone Can Be a Math Person Once They Know the Best Learning Techniques | Po-Shen Loh Po-Shen Loh is a Hertz Foundation Fellow and Carnegie Mellon mathematics professor who thinks that history is a much harder subject than math. Do you agree? Well, your position on that might change...CC
2:38 Bill Nye: How NASA Will Look for Alien Life in the TRAPPIST-1 System, and Beyond When NASA announced the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 solar system in February 2017, humanity’s collective ears spiked. The system is made up of a dwarf star surrounded by seven “Earth-like” exoplane...CC
4:29 Are Humans Emotional Creatures or Are We Rational? | Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom For once, an optimistic worldview is the one sparking controversy. Paul Bloom thinks humans are not prisoners to their emotions, but have great capacity for rationality and reason. This makes him a...
4:32 Instant Drone Delivery: How a Former Google Lab Will Disrupt the Ownership Economy | Astro Teller If the future, your buffalo chicken wings will fly to you. Drone delivery is going to bring so much more than food, however; these aeronautical robots will, in time, herald the end of private owner...CC
3:29 Hate, Humor, and Political Correctness in America | Josh Lieb Josh Lieb is an absolutist when it comes to freedom of speech. As a comedy writer and producer on late night programs like The Daily Show and The Tonight Show, he knows that the freedom to essentia...CC
3:45 Philosophies of Self: East-West Distinctions | Gish Jen You can learn a lot about yourself by looking through the lens of a different worldview. Gish Jen presents that awareness here by comparing notions of self-identity in the Eastern world and in the ...CC
4:19 Tucker Carlson vs. Bill Nye: Round Two – The Science Guy's Reply On February 27, Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson invited Bill Nye onto his show to talk about climate change, only to yell over him, belittle his qualifications, and bafflingly interrupt answers t...CC
2:03 Can Innovation Save the Fossil Fuel Industry? | Max Mankin If Modern Electron, an energy innovation startup co-founded by Max Mankin, could make fossil fuels just 1% more efficient it would equal the entire contribution from all the solar panels across the...
4:41 Earwolf: The Making of a Podcast Network | Scott Aukerman If an idea comes along that is complicated and terrifying and you want to run a million miles from it—you’re probably onto a great thing. That’s the takeaway from Scott Aukerman, who co-founded the...CC
6:09 The Gay Rights Playbook Is a Model for Change in America | Evan Wolfson For four decades, gay rights activists and couples who appealed to the courts for the right to marry their partners were fighting against a legal system. The real battle, however, was against publi...CC
5:01 Bill Nye on NASA, Space Exploration, and Mars Why is NASA so important? Let us count the ways – for its intellectual and physical daring, its spinoff technology that has advanced civilization generally (we wouldn’t have the internet without NA...
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5:29 Altered States of Consciousness: There’s Nothing Supernatural About It | Jamie Wheal Transcendent experiences that were once attributed to gods, angels, muses, or even possession, are now being demystified by neuroscience. Jamie Wheal, Director of Programs at the Flow Genome Projec...CC
5:35 A Scientific Explanation of the Human Mind | Daniel Siegel Back in 1988, Pixies asked the catchy question: “Where is my mind?”. Now, nearly 30 years later, UCLA psychiatry professor Daniel Siegel has a revolutionary answer. We’ve come to accept that the br...CC
7:42 Rust Belt Populism: An Economic Analysis | Pia Malaney Americans understands very well what feels wrong – and there's a piece of U.S. economic policy that the establishment and educated elites haven’t been fully honest about, says Pia Malaney.Read more...CC
4:47 The Making of O.J. Simpson: Made in America | Ezra Edelman Every great documentary is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of difficult decisions. Director Ezra Edelman, who just won the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award for O.J. Simpson: Made in...CC
2:41 ‘Hey Bill Nye, Our Brains Are All the Same – Why Aren’t People More Identical?’ Our brains are the same organ, but no way are we all the same people. So why do we like different things, if we’re all made of roughly the same parts? Everybody’s brain development is a little bit ...CC