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Touch has always played an important role in our development and in our tendency to make certain judgments and take certain risks.

Our somewhat quiet (beyond Etna’s frequent paroxysms – and the cool lava “spine” that formed after the last one) volcanic fall continues. We have been following a lot of rumbling […]

A robot around the size of a human hand has already climbed a 1,500ft rope up the Grand Canyon, driven the Le Mans circuit for 24 hours, and is set to do Hawaii’s triathlon.

Will there will come a time when putting up an all-glass building is like wearing a fur coat? About 90,000 birds are killed each year by flying into buildings in New York City alone.

Home prices in many famous cities are over $1,000 per square foot but MIT architects from the “1K House” project have already produced a $5,925 home prototype.

Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, on how entrepreneurs can disrupt major industries, although it’s like “staring into the face of death.”

Orthopedic surgical trainee Mark Frame 3D printed a model of a bone from a CT scan, as preparation for surgery, for a fraction of the usual price of such a model.

In my anticipation to get out of town everything seems to take a little longer. A woman snags the last open pump at the gas station. An empty bucket of […]

Mention the school of Pop Art to casual art lovers and you’ll immediately get the response, “Andy Warhol.” Warhol sucks up most of the oxygen in any discussion of Pop, […]

What happens when the one-time innovator becomes calcified and defensive, and refuses to accept criticism, shutting himself off in isolation? According to Thomas DeLong, sometimes long-term success requires short-term failure.

Two decades after the concept of ‘sustainability’ shifted from a financial to an environmental association, corporations are seeing the business case for focusing on the environment.

British scientists hope to use a huge balloon and hosepipe to shoot particles into the atmosphere–like an erupting volcano–and cool down Earth. A prototype is ready to try.

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space observatory has already identified more than 1,200 planetary candidates and tomorrow NASA will announce a new discovery by it.

Arctic sea ice is melting at its fastest pace in almost 40 years. The Northwest Passage was again ice-free this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years.

Along with the likes of Daimler, Honda and Toyota, all of whom firmly believe hydrogen is the fuel of the future, Hyundai is hyping hydrogen, cruising cross-country in a fuel-cell Tucson.

1. The post on David Brooks is coming.  But for now—due to popular demand—some comments on the Tea Party debate. 2. The problem with the Tea Party members is somewhat […]

Watson will soon be diagnosing medical cases – and not just the everyday cases, either.

“If you’ve just had a bad week at the office,” suggests Keith Broomfield in a recent article in The Scotsman, “then spare a thought for 19th-century artist John Everett Millais […]

On Sunday the New York Times published reviews of the two best new fiction books I’ve read in 2011: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, and Anatomy of a […]

The eccentric magiciansPenn and Teller used to come onstage naked at the beginning of performances, to demonstrate they didn’t have any “tricks up their sleeves.” And yet, Penn Jillette (the […]

Take two strapping young men. Give one of them a job as a lifeguard from May until September. For the same period, pay the other one to “farm gold” in […]

The Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine have won this month’s Sidney Award for excellence in socially conscious journalism, the Sidney Hillman Foundation announced Tuesday. The winning […]

I am thinking about investing in a husband. While it is true that I won’t be able to sell him in the future if I ever need some quick cash […]

Start-up Badgeville is launching a new product called Social Fabric that aims to go beyond gamification to give companies more ability to drive user behavior.

For some strange reason, I ended up watching the new movie The Help yesterday, less than twenty four hours after viewing Driving Miss Daisy for the first time. The most […]

More than other devices, the tablet can know enough about you to understand the context around your queries and give you better answers when you search.

Great Big Ideas, the first Floating University course, features twelve of the most important thinkers and practitioners in their fields. These lecturers are constantly making news, and in this blog, […]

The big issue for reporters, editors, and publishers isn’t automated text generation. It’s the explosion of free human-authored content on the Web.

Great for consumers, bad for authors? As Amazon prepares to launch its long-rumored Android-powered tablet, it is also reportedly thinking about an e-book rental service.

Digital fitness–the ability to adapt to changes in the digital environment—is lacking in the PR sector though it was an early adopter of social media. Time to rethink traditional PR tactics.