It’s a dismal view, but the main reason why we have Valentine’s Day is to stimulate commerce. However, it’s not obvious that a day created to stimulate commerce really stimulates.
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The director of An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for “Superman” reflects on how life’s path has a strange and wonderful way of catching up with us—no matter where we go.
How veiled is our language? Euphemisms can be private or public, trivial or deadly, serious or joky—but they can’t be dispensed with, says Ralph Keyes in his new book.
In the high-stakes arena of Google search results, some companies game the system in order to get high traffic. But Google insists there are standards in search engine optimization.
Why the jobless recovery? Our scientists and technologists have not been able to create inventions that can be industrialised at the same pace as they once did.
Thousands of protesters flooded the streets of the Algerian capital Algiers on Saturday, defying a ban on demonstrations and calling for political reform in the North African country.
So for the slow weekend, I thought I’d stick in some more thoughts of movies I saw a year or so ago, before I became a BIG THINKer. I saw A Single […]
With Time magazine’s recent cover story on futurist Ray Kurzweil, his theories about the singularity have entered the mainstream. Now hear them straight from the source.
Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln held seances in the White House trying to contact the spirit of their dead son Willie. Or was it a calculated political move?
Today, the morning after, it is time to ask ourselves some questions about what comes next for the Middle East, especially in Yemen, the base of operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Al-Ittihad, a newspaper from the UAE, has a story out today that claims Said Ali al-Shihri was killed when a bomb he was assembling exploded, killing him and wounding five […]
Using very little energy, a 62,000-mile-high space elevators could carry travelers out of earth’s gravity well and up to a spaceship dock. It could be tomorrow morning’s commute.
While many people predicted during the frenzy of the dot-com bubble that the rise of the Internet would mean the “end of geography”, that hasn’t happened.
The end of the Mubarak regime in Egypt is likely to have a much larger impact on the region than the end of the regime in Tunisia, according to MEC […]
Online dating sites provide a marketplace to easily shop around and find interesting people to meet, but building lasting relationships requires more offline maintenance.
Great news for chocolate lovers: new research published in Chemistry Central Journal claims that chocolate contains more antioxidants (polyphenols and flavanols) than fruit juice.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, a research scientist at the University of Texas, decided to put the kiss under a microscope. She recently spoke about why a kiss really is more than just a kiss.
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is in the air. Or is it oxytocin? Research suggests that the so-called “love hormone” isn’t all roses and heart-shaped chocolates.
While an actual level of shady and dishonest practices is probably impossible to measure, the U.S. has slipped from 19 to 22 in the latest ranking of perceived public corruption.
Today we are being told of the purported economic payoffs of, above all, the promise of so-called “green jobs.” Unfortunately, that does not measure up to economic reality.
Social media, most notably Facebook and Twitter, have featured prominently in recent years as tools of the opposition in insurrections against entrenched regimes.
With Hosni Mubarak out, there are key things the U.S. should do to help Egypt not go the way Iran, Russia and China went during their revolutions, allowing tyrannies to take over.
Two years before opening his Barnes Foundation in 1925, Dr. Albert C. Barnes vowed that in his new institution, “negro art will have a place among the great art manifestations […]
Is the rise in boob jobs and other elective surgeries a sign of renewed consumer confidence, or a harbinger of continued economic malaise?
The DealBook editor breaks business leaders into two major categories, embodied by Apple’s Steve Jobs on one end and GE’s Jeff Immelt on the other.
Well, not everyone can live at C Street… Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is demanding an investigation into reports that at least 32 members of Congress are […]
Where did the week go? Some news! Webcams: Eruptions readers have been keeping an eye on a lot of volcanoes lately – and it sounds like it has paid off. […]
Last week TSA Administrator John Pistole bestowed very limited collective bargaining rights on the nation’s 40,000 Transportation Security Officers. Even if the TSOs vote to unionize, they will be barred […]
Last week, I introduced a course I am teaching this semester on “Science, Environment, and the Media,” and asked students as well as readers to describe in the comment sections […]
Sex-abuse scandals involving priests have shaken Ireland but is that enough to break the grip of the Catholic Church?