Search Results

A couple of days ago, I wrote about an op-ed William Cronon wrote in The New York Times arguing that by attempting to strip public unions of their bargaining rights, […]

Physicists at Stanford, who have spearheaded the billion-dollar Gravity Probe B mission, have announced that they have found Einstein’s missing inch, once again proving the correctness of general relativity.  According […]

I’ve been asked whether I should reconsider my recent praise of AMERICAN IDOL as an admirably and characteristically American mixture of wisdom and consent.  Although I can’t really speak as […]

With tuition spiraling upwards as the cost of learning paradoxically plummets, higher education is on an unsustainable course. 

Though bold predictions have been made in the past about ending cancer, we are still years away from a cure for cancer, if such a thing even exists. But advancements in prevention and detection are revolutionizing the way cancer is treated.

You are looking at the first color image of Mercury from orbit. It was taken by NASA’s Mercury Messenger spacecraft, which is on a mission to “unravel the history and evolution of the Solar System’s innermost planet.”

The first time I came across this new phenomenon was in my interview with Jeff Evans, one of the co-founders of MindSnacks back in August 2010. When I asked him […]

Here is a list of some of the health crises that weren’t—crises that were either completely unfounded or that received an unwarranted amount media attention commensurate to their actual risk.

Seemingly every year there are new reports that something we consume or use on a daily basis is carcinogenic. But what exactly does that mean on a biological level?

One in three Americans are diagnosed at some point in their lifetime with cancer, a derangement of normal cell growth in which cells grow in antisocial ways, crossing natural tissue boundaries. 

DEAN YEAGER: “Doctor… Venkman. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge… or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind […]

Michael Port says… n n The time has come. We cannot wait anymore. For years, we have hidden behind our own small thoughts or let ourselves be held back by […]

In a guest post today, Lauren Krizel reports on an event held this week in Washington, DC that gathered some of the city’s top chefs to discuss sustainability and the […]

Can and should we try to drill deep into the earth, past the crust and into the mantle? We’ve tried in the past but haven’t gotten far. If the earth was an orange, we’d have barely zested it.

Only 2% of the 3 billion DNA base pairs in the human genome actually code for proteins, but the rest of our non-coding genes are proving vital to understanding a host of diseases like autism and schizophrenia.

You’re about to hand laptops over to their 12– and 13–year-old children. What do you tell your school’s parents? Here are some excerpts from what Rob McCrae, ICT Director for the […]

In less than two weeks, I’ll be taking a short pilgrimage from San Francisco to Monterey for the e.g. — an event that has been summarized to me by a previous attendee as “what TED […]

It’s Mother’s Day. Are you thinking about mom? No, not because it’s Mother’s Day, but because mom is a trendsetter a virtual thermometer of what’s hot and what’s not. I […]

The education revolution is already underway, but will it utilize the pre-existing network created by Facebook, or will a new, education-specific network spring up? 

Everyone knows someone that has been touched by cancer. Over one and a half million Americans will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in 2011, and more than 560,000 […]

The Cancer Genome Atlas project, already several years underway, is transforming the way scientists think about and treat cancer.  

“What happened to Africa?” an art-world friend of New York Times writer Holland Cotter asked. “It disappeared.” What that friend was alluding to, and what Cotter analyzes in a recent […]

In a guest post today, Samantha Miller probes the relation between perceptions and reality in the organic food marketplace.  Miller is a graduate student in Journalism at American University.  She […]

The mainstream is beginning to accept the “post-rational view of the mind, but what next? How do we rethink our societal assumptions and institutions? Join the conversation here with the After Thought Project.

So the third suggestion of Hacker and Dreifus in HIGHER EDUCATION concerns avoiding PLAGIARISM.  Plagiarism is easier than ever these days–thanks to the abundant resources on the web.  And the ingenuity […]

While natural disasters such as floods and tornadoes have captured our attention this summer, the scale of destruction is very slight compared to the worst man-made disasters.

In order to grapple with the future, we must first take a big step back and understand the historical pattern of technology disruptions. The story begins by recalling the original […]

After reading a story earlier this week about the problems in Bank of America’s mortgage modification department, I wondered—has the mortgage crisis become so large and pervasive that we have […]

At one time, it seemed inconceivable that Detroit—the leading automotive center in the world—could ever lose its place on the world stage. But what if Silicon Valley is not ready for the Post-Silicon Era?

Sunday May 22 was unification day in Yemen, the anniversary of the date in 1990 in which north and south Yemen united to form a single state.  It was also […]