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The Washington Post profiles Barton Seaver today, the chef who put 14th street’s Saint X on the map foodwise and then helped launch the ultra-successful Hook in Georgetown. Seaver is […]

“Politicians don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter,” declared Andew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, at Hybrid Reality’s recent salon on the emerging revolution in […]

Erik Olin Wright, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, thinks providing free transportation would reduce traffic and pollution, and create more efficient labor markets.

More than 50 years after the publication of CP Snow’s seminal Two Cultures, interdisciplinary partnerships between science and other academic “cultures” are being urged once again. Today, the focus is […]

Held in over 30 countries, the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative represents the state-of-the-art in new approaches to public engagement, the subject of several recent reports and meetings. […]

This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]

“Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”, Mark Twain famously responded after reading his obituary in the New York Journal. To which may now be added “Reports of the […]

NOVA’s new Mt. Saint Helens special has some great footage of the volcano, but plays a little loose with the science and doomsday tone.

One of the unlikeliest complexes of enclaves and exclaves in the world is to be found on the Belgian-Dutch border, and is centred on Baarle. This town, while surrounded entirely […]

One of the most wonderful things about the emerging global superbrain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond what we can wrap our heads around.

Experts commonly accept the Hudson River School, led by Thomas Cole, as the first true American art school and movement. They looked at the American landscape and saw something the […]

With brain scans, scientists have learned much about what happens in our heads during sleep, but they still can’t answer the simple question: why do we sleep?

What should the U.S. do about the 26 million people who are currently unemployed, underemployed or marginally attached in the labor force? Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor thinks that […]

We don’t need an energy or resources tax; we need an instrument for letting resource prices rise in parallel with resource productivity.

Rob Reynolds recalls the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, how business leaders were more coarse at that time, and how reaction to the spill fed a fledgling American environmental movement.

Last year, betacup extended a challenge to the creative community to rethink the coffee cup from a sustainable angle that eliminates the 58 million disposable cups America tosses in the […]

“Progress without pollution may sound utterly unrealistic, but businesses are putting green chemistry into practice,” by using more ecologically benign chemicals, writes Scientific American.

On the road from Korea’s world-class Incheon airport, across the spectacular eight-mile long humpback bridge to the landmark new Songdo International Business District development, we encountered a heavy fog that reminded […]

An amazing feat of engineering, but at the cost of much blood and treasure

With Republicans gaining the majority in the House, closing the gap in the Senate, and controlling the state legislatures and Governor offices in key states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, […]

Every year, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards a $100,000 prize to a project that has the potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems and significantly improve human quality of life. The […]

n So it’s 2010, and we’re not living on Mars, nor even zipping through the sky in flying cars. But neither do we have to bow to our new insect […]

Yesterday, President Obama traveled to Holland, Michigan, a city on the western shore of the state’s Lower Peninsula, to attend the groundbreaking for a factory that will manufacture high-grade lithium-ion […]

Over the past couple of years, marine sustainability has risen to the top of the environmental movement’s concerns. But in a supply/demand market economy, our seafood choices as consumers have a significant impact on the issue. So how can design help consumers make smarter, more sustainable seafood choices?

Prester John as virtual as he was virtuous, the legend literally too good to be true.

It is an event with which I am slightly ashamed—and even the excuse that it happened over twenty years ago and that I was only a bit player does not […]

In the age of greenwashing and eco-everything, it’s becoming increasingly hard to standardize and fairly assess what constitutes a green product. The USDA has attempted to do this for food […]

Did we miss a utopia or avoid a disaster?

Ernst Weizsäcker, Co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, believes that we could be doing five times better than we are when it comes to addressing global […]

Warming world, warming waters, coral reef die-off. You know the drill. But until recently, marine biologists knew relatively little about  what exactly was going on, on the bacterial level, when […]