In his book Blind Spots, Professor Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School argues that the Challenger fiasco exploited inconsistencies in the decision-making mechanisms of the brain.
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A new study has deepened the mystery of dark matter, that evasive substance that keeps entire galaxies together. The standard cosmological model may be wrong as a result.
The dominant idea that the world’s oil supplies are a finite and known quantity is a dangerous lie that creates subsidies to protect consumers while climate change rages on.
While countries in North America and Europe suffer through a downturn that has people questioning the very foundations of their economies, something far more positive is happening in South America. […]
It may be tempting to think that if you want to be innovative, your office has to “have all these weird things going on.” Not so, says Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. The real power comes from shaking things up.
— Guest post by Luis Hestres, American University doctoral student. Ever since the financial crisis hit the U.S. in late 2008, many political commentators (mostly on the Left) have wondered […]
The world’s first spaceport was officially inaugurated in New Mexico last week. It will be used primarily by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic to carry tourists into sub-orbital space.
Experts and dreamers gathered recently to discuss the possibility of sending humans far into deep space, possibly to Alpha Centauri, the star nearest our own Sun.
Climate change poses ‘an immediate, growing and grave threat’ to health and security around the world, said doctors, academics and military experts at a conference in London.
Once Facebook flips the switch on the official public launch of its all-new Timeline feature, nearly any action that you take will become instantly sharable online to your friends as […]
My previous post, “The Blinding Fog of Religious Moderation“, drew some criticism from people who felt that I was unjustly lumping moderate believers together with fundamentalists. So, in this post, […]
Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it.
Yesterday, Grockit announced a $7 million USD Series D funding round which is in itself already newsworthy. Even more interesting to me though was the launch of a new feature […]
That’s the conclusion of Flagg Taylor—one of the leading experts on totalitarian communism: I’ve spent and continue to spend a great deal of time thinking about totalitarianism. In what guise […]
Suppose you have a disease…an incurable fatal disease…and a drug has just been approved that can treat that disease. The drug only works in about half the people who […]
Every art lover knows the story. Sad, mad Vincent Van Gogh went into the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise on the morning of July 27, 1890 to paint Wheatfield with Crows […]
New, free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data are providing competition for premium providers such as TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Navigon.
Finding out that Facebook still tracks them when logged out has driven many users to use the Google Chrome extension Disconnect to help protect their privacy.
Just as peacocks spread their tails to signal virility, men have used conspicuous consumption to signal wealth and women have used the appearance of youth to signal fertility – all […]
4chan founder Christopher Poole, knwon for promoting the value of digital anonymity, on why the Web should recognise that, “We all have multiple identities. It’s not abnormal.”
Alongside usability and user experience, Web design must provide PET (persuasion, emotion, trust) to yield the right results from users. Paul Rouke says Booking.com shows how.
Ford is installing a feature in its new vehicles—and many of its older ones—that uses its voice-activated technology to read text messages out loud.
The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, […]
Here’s an interesting graph from a new paper by Kenny Shirley and Andrew Gelman: The most obvious thing here is white Americans have been and remain much more likely to […]
Last Thursday I recorded a bloggingheads session on Yemen with Afrah Nasser. In the 43-minute video we talked about the current stalemate in Sanaa and what, if anything, can be […]
“It turns out we’re not the only species that assembles ourselves into networks,” says sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis.
From hard data about China’s economic prowess to cultural markers like Sesame Street’s new impoverished puppet, it sure seems like the U.S. is losing ground, and fast.
Globalization brings structural changes to national economies faster than they can react, resulting in unemployment, skill mismatches and wealth inequality, says Nobel Laureate Michael Spence.
On October 31st, the United Nations estimates that the seventh billion child will be born. But people have worried about overpopulation since long ago. Are we approaching a threshold?
This past Saturday, October 15th, marked a momentous occasion in the history of cleanliness: the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day. Yes, it exists. Established by the Global Public Private Partnership […]