“An anthropologist argues that polygamy is harmful as Canada considers whether having multiple wives is a constitutional right.” Our neighbors to the North take a surprising turn.
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A private university in England has changed their curriculum to offer a two-year degree and its students highly approve. A two-year degree may make more economic sense in our times.
“Overall, social support increases survival by some 50 percent, concluded the authors behind a new meta-analysis.” Scientific American reports on the effects of our spreading social isolation.
Job retraining seems like an ideal solution for the unemployed, but problems persist. Are Americans being trained for the right jobs, and what if nobody is hiring in the first place?
“According to a controversial new theory, our emotions have evolved as tools to manipulate others into cooperating with us.” The New Scientist says emotions are the currency of relationships.
Illustrator Jess Bachman diagrams Glenn Beck’s shady links to Goldline in an accessible infographic. To summarize: Goldine is a sponsor of Beck’s TV and radio shows. Beck tells his audience […]
David Keith, director of the Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary, says geoengineering should be “a central part of how we think about managing climate risk over the next 100 years.”
The big cognitive and emotional news in the Mind Matters household is that it is expecting the arrival in a few weeks of a demanding, very long-staying guest, whose personality […]
The newspapers of yore had two dependable revenue streams: subscribers and advertisers. Today’s broadsheets draw money from the same sources, but funding problems at even the most mainstream papers are […]
Trypanophobia – the extreme, irrational fear of needles – is said to affect 10% of American adults. And then there are the merely squeamish ones, for whom getting a shot […]
In my most recent book “Physics of the Impossible,” I define three classes of impossibilities in regards to technology. Class One impossibilities are technologies that are impossible today but don’t […]
Big ideas are usually too big, says Jason Fried, co-founder of the software company 37signals and co-author of the workplace manifesto “Rework.” “If we have a big idea, let’s chop […]
A $20m refit aims to cut the Empire State Building’s energy use by 40% and save emissions equal to 20,000 cars, says the Guardian. The motive is profit rather than conscience.
Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg says the democratization of the media is an improvement over alleged moral gatekeepers like Walter Cronkite, the ‘saint of bourgeois America.’
The Smart Set considers the phrase ‘State-of-the-Art’ and asks why some things receive so much praise just for being new? Progress, it says, is something distinct from improvement.
A group of leaders spread across the globe have been given secret keys and are “charged with rebooting the web if it is sent into meltdown by a terror attack or mass hacking.”
“A reduction in crop yields caused by climate change could mean up to 6.7 million additional Mexicans will emigrate to the United States by 2080, says a study by Princeton University researchers.”
General Motor’s new hybrid car will soon sell for $33,500, after a government credit. The machine will be a test of the public’s willingness to go hybrid and its confidence in a revamped GM.
“The Massachusetts Legislature has approved a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system,” says The Boston Globe. The state’s electoral votes would follow the national popular vote.
“The communist government of North Korea, currently bouncing through the headlines once more, was supposed to have gone out of business at least a generation ago.”
“Digital freedom campaigners have welcomed a US ruling that loosens Apple’s tight control over what users of its iPhone can do with the device.” The Independent on digital copyrights.
“People are turned on by photographs of people who resemble their close genetic counterparts,” say researchers. The recent findings shed light onto who we are attracted to and why.
“We never know the source of the leak,” Julian Assange assured a London audience today at the Frontline Club. The uniquely charismatic WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief went on: “We could make a […]
“There was a time when building the future was inspirational,” Brian Fies writes in his new graphic novel, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? “Ambitious. Romantic. Even enobling. I […]
The U.S. education system is based on the meritocratic principle that no matter what the circumstances of a child’s birth, each should have a baseline level of education and the […]
Let’s face it: The planet is heating up, Earth’s population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than […]
When, after thirty years of authoritarian rule, a young dissident and perennial thorn in the side of the Establishment, Mohammed Nasheed won the first free and fair election in the Maldives in […]
Whether or not there is a creativity crisis may be up for debate, but one thing is clear: Our current education system is failing to create an environment that truly fosters creativity . . . Now, a new application out of MIT Media Lab is aiming to address some of these issues.
In June 2009 the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill to reduce carbon emissions through a series of cap-and-trade regulations. The news this week that the Senate version of […]