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Optimism Bias – “Things will work out okay” or “things will work out better for me than the next guy” or, simply, “It won’t happen to ME!” – is one the mental games we play in order to do the things we want to do even when those choices come with costs or danger. 

A team of scientists has come up with a way to make voice authentication simpler and, at the same time, much more secure. 

Last week, Massachusetts congressman Edward Markey submitted the “Wireless Surveillance Act of 2012,” which aims to protect the constitutional rights of cell phone users.

Numbers really are sexy.  They are what will power our world for the foreseeable future.  They are available like never before, and we know now how to use them wisely. 

Some of the world’s top professional writers swear by software that makes the Internet inaccessible while they write. Is Internet access keeping you from more create enterprise? 

            A new study regarding a high-profile risk…mercury…has two important findings; there may be an association between in-utero mercury exposure and ADHD as kids grow up, but the children of […]

In two recent experiments, animals got fatter at a faster rate when fed genetically modified food. Because the US lacks a labeling system for GM foods, consumers cannot make informed decisions. 

This article was originally published on AlterNet. When you hear the word “interfaith,” you might think of people from different religions working together to do charitable deeds: running a soup […]

My recent post “Building Justice” talked about how human beings have to work together if we want to build a just world to live in. I want to say some […]

“Technology-loving comedian from the future” Baratunde Thurston says that in an economy of information abundance, you don’t have to feel obligated to pay attention to it all.

But here’s a radical idea: America needs to create an army of hackers to defend cyberspace. And sooner rather than later.

A recent study examining social networks’ influence on individual behavior found that online pressure from friends to vote inspires more people to go to the polls.

A growing number of researchers are using websites like Twitter and Facebook to monitor our well-being in a way that seemed impossible not long ago.

It’s no secret that future disruptive demographic changes will have profound implications for the relationship between employers and employees. But what’s less well known is that some of those demographic […]

The idea of forgery resonates more than ever today in a culture in which “the open exchange of ideas has been rebranded as piracy.” 

As you probably know by now, my friend Greta Christina was diagnosed with cancer last week, and she’s having surgery today. In the grand scheme of things, it could have […]

Last week, four third-party U.S. presidential candidates had a debate in Chicago. As is usual in American politics, third-party debates tend to be all over the map: a mixture of […]

A recently-released line of state-of-the-art mainframes proves that, all these years later, IBM is still going strong in the Internet age.

What’s the Big Idea?The increasingly fluid cultural landscape and an overabundance of information call for new ways to gather useful business intelligence. In our hyper-connected world, ideas, data and conversations move […]

            If you devote the patience necessary to finish this short post, you will end up a better decision maker. But then, as you will discover in the paragraphs below, […]

For a couple of days, I was inclined to buy the theory that Obama won the election because his campaign was so “metric driven.”  Metric driven in this case seems […]

After his loss in Tuesday night’s debate, the Republican nominee for president is now known as the candidate who goes out of his way to compile resumes on female job candidates and […]

         Americans have always disagreed, about a lot. Somehow though, we’ve managed to get along with each other while we do. Why, then, has disagreeing become so nasty, so fierce, […]

A year ago Mike Konczal noticed something stunning about the stories on the We Are the 99% Tumblr: The people in them don’t sound like late 20th century consumers who […]

Thirty-five years after their launch, the two Voyager deep space probes are about to enter interstellar space, while still transmitting data back to Earth.

Recently two brothers named Chaplin created the smallest book in the world. Their tiny tome, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, is etched on a microchip narrower than the width of a […]

A team of Australian researchers have created the world’s first ‘pre-bionic’ visual implant, laying the ground for a camera-based implant as the technology evolves in the years ahead. 

There are many people in the world who do not worry about not having access to the Internet or being able to use a computer on a day to day […]

As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]

As Yale’s Ainissa Ramirez explains in this new video, the harsh Russian winter, combined with the chemical properties of tin, may have led to “the greatest wardrobe malfunction in history.”