Think the private sector has a monopoly on innovation and government is just hopeless bureaucracy? Not DARPA. It’s the agency that invented the Internet and flies at Mach 20.
All Articles
Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, are developing a suite of satellites armed with powerful lasers to change the course of asteroids that threaten Earth.
I can still vividly remember reading, back in 2001, the New York Times Magazinewrite-up on the release of The Corrections. It began: Some days, Jonathan Franzen wrote in the dark. […]
The amino acids that can be found inside comets, which are also the building blocks of life, sustain the heat and pressure of an impact, say researchers, and even form peptide bonds.
Every Wednesday, Dr. Michio Kaku answers reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and […]
Majorities around the world believe that the climate of the earth is changing, that human activity is contributing to those changes, that the changes are happening so fast they […]
by Daphne Muller At the center of the debate surrounding the legality of George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin is the question of whether or not Zimmerman uttered a racial […]
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS telescope have studied over 100 nearby red dwarf stars over the last six years. 40 percent of these common stars were observed to wobble, a […]
What is the Big Idea? Back in the 16th century, a group of rural and urban weavers who worked in the Black Forest mountain range of Germany formed a guild […]
What’s the Big Idea? Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne […]
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, the 20 year old Iraqi founder of the Global Secular Humanist Movement – a forum for the discussion of rational […]
It looks like the Supreme Court may well declare unconstitutional at least the “mandate” part of “Obamacare.” This astute observer explains why Justice Kennedy’s understanding of the relevant issue makes […]
You might think the debate over the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act is a classic confrontation between state power and individual liberty, big government liberalism versus minimal state […]
One of my favorite books on leadership is The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. You can read my […]
The super-Earths discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission may be better at supporting life than Earth itself, says the Harvard astronomer who coined the term super-Earth.
When density perturbations in space cause it to collapse, black holes are created in a range of sizes. Some are extremely small and could pass straight through the Earth.
There is only one measure of time that matters to the current Internet generation: the here and now. The Cult of Now is influencing everything that we do and every […]
One of Earth Platinum’s 31 copies could be yours for a mere $100,000
Read Part 2 here. I’ve talked about the weather, the crowds, the protesters and the speakers, and I wanted to end up with some overall impressions. One of the things […]
What is the Big Idea? The slums of Sangli, a city in southwestern India, is nothing more than a patch of blank space on a map. But thanks to Google […]
Facebook says employers who request applicants’ passwords will face ‘unanticipated legal challenges’. What does that mean, exactly? Would you hand your password over for a job?
No matter the job, institutions increasingly require applicants to maintain an online presence, whether than means managing content, tweaking a website’s design or writing code in earnest.
Email overload is linked to decreased productivity, an inability to focus on important tasks, even emotional and physical stress. Activity streams, a potential alternative, are gaining popularity.
Very often, the most creative things happen in the most implausible places, such as the creation of the first electronic digital computer at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
On Sunday, Andrew Sullivan offered a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s new book, When I Was A Child I Read Books, as excerpted in Guernica: Jefferson says that we are endowed with […]
How would you describe the Republican candidates? A Washington Post/Pew Research poll conducted two weeks ago asked respondents what one word came to mind when they heard the name of […]
What’s the Big Idea? Want to scare a book publisher, a record store owner, or even a doctor? Creep up behind her and shout: disintermediation! This is the term du […]
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Robert Greenberg — pianist, music historian, and author of How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and […]
The Being Human Conference, which took place at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts this weekend, was designed to explore the science of human experience. The speakers ranged from neuroscientists, […]
My household has split opinions on the new Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC. I think it is amazing that a national news show has a black woman with braided hair […]