In the United States we have shamefully convinced most high school students that they either need to go to Harvard or they need to go to McDonald’s.
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Dutch designer Dave Hakkens admits he doesn’t know how it would work, but his idea of Phonebloks — easily-replaced parts that fit together “like Legos” to create a customized phone — has gained considerable attention.
Blackfish is a beautiful and powerful documentary about, yes, the corporate greed of SeaWorld. But it also, through remarkable facts, shows us the neuroscience of orcas. These animals—most commonly and […]
Results of a study encompassing three decades of relationships reveal that having a divorced friend or acquaintance increased the likelihood of a person’s own marriage ending. It’s the first to examine how one’s social network can affect romantic relationships.
Kudos to the ever-reasonable Ruth Marcus, who defends her friend Emily Yoffe, who wrote what seems on the deconstructed face of things to be banal advice: young women are safer […]
The bills to require photo IDs at the voting booth that Republicans have been pushing in a couple of dozen states over the past few years always carry this justification: […]
“How I’ll gobble Paris up, if I’m lucky enough to go back there!” painter Fernand Léger wrote in a 1915 letter home from the front lines of World War I. […]
Two recent announcements—well, one announcement and one pronouncement—are making the rounds: popular self-help author Marianne Williamson has thrown herself into the political ring by running for the congressional seat in […]
Dozens of papers have been published to create the perfect commuting algorithm. But how do you account for factors like the weather? Or even local politics?
We all feel compassion towards our offspring, but what about the stranger on the street? What about the person who has a different skin color or a different religion?
It takes a fair amount to get my blood boiling at 5:21 a.m., but an NPR Morning Edition interview with a new savior of investigative journalism, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, […]
Ask each person individually who benefits more from the relationship.
71 percent of employers choose emotional intelligence over IQ.
The most important part of life is work, it’s the flow, it’s getting stuff done, feeling like you’re doing something. We have that in spades. We’re really, really happy.
I am asking members of the new upper class to stop concentrating so much on living a glossy life and think of the ways in which they can lead a more textured life.
Like a greyhound race, politics is a competition. And as the rabbit keeps moving ahead, the greyhounds are incentivized to keep chasing. Consistency bias is simply the failure to admit that’s what we’re doing.
In a provocative thought experiment, Jonathon Keats considers how two seemingly incompatible systems – religion and science – might find a way “to talk to each other or at least to cross paths.”
Found by the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s the farthest galaxy located to date, and is giving astronomers one of the earliest glimpses of what the universe was like after the Big Bang.
“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti
A new study finds that the area’s dry season is three weeks longer than it was 30 years ago, and predicts it could extend longer than what was forecast by last month’s intergovernmental climate change report.
Australian researchers have discovered particles of gold in the leaves of eucalyptus trees, and speculate that they’re coming up from larger deposits underground.
A new study confirms what common sense would tell us, namely, that you need to try what is unfamiliar and mentally challenging to improve cognitive function. This might involve learning a new skill, like photography.
Now that a prototype of a crew capsule has been built and is ready for testing, it’s still not clear how the US’ next manned spacecraft will be used.
In a few months, World View will offer tickets for balloon rides that will take passengers to an altitude of about 100,000 feet. It’s not high enough to experience microgravity, but they promise an awesome view.
Contrary to popular belief, competing with other individuals or companies is counterproductive. From a business perspective, focusing on your competition instead of focusing on continuous innovation by creating new, must […]
“Rapid urbanization is the fastest, most intense social phenomenon that ever happened to humankind, perhaps to biology on Earth. I think we can now start to understand in new and […]
There’s no simple answer. Recently in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert gave us an evenhanded review of two conflicting perspectives on population levels, offering a sobering assessment of our near […]
Working with Caltech and MinecraftEdu, Google has released a mod for the popular world-building game that provides insights into quantum behavior.
For a short period in human history, the two-way flow of information was overshadowed by mass media. Today, the pendulum is swinging back to the way things used to be.
Rote knowledge is worth less and less than it was before. And so we need an education system that challenges students at all levels, particularly as they get a little older to think about problem solving skills, to be able to be broader in their base of education.