Defenders of copyright law often talk about how copyright is a ‘right’ for artists but ignore that at the same time it often takes away the rights of users.
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Do you know what Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo stands for? The Chinese dissident has praised the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and said China should be fully westernized.
The world system is being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers.
The father of microfinance, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and folk hero Muhammad Yunus, has been accused of misusing development aid — a claim he says is “a total fabrication.”
Sorry about the lack of updates – I’ve had some computer-related issues here at the AGU 2010 meeting, but hopefully tomorrow I can highlight some cool stuff I’ve learned about […]
One of the frustrations that comes with a new and interesting idea is the large number of people who will tell you that you’re actually saying something old and familiar. […]
The beauty of the allegations against the Wikileaks progenitor is that no one, save his accusers and Assange himself, knows the truth.
The NYU Economist who famously saw the global financial crisis before it happened shares his methods on how he did it, and what he sees next.
The open-source movement’s capacity for collaborative innovation on the content and productivity side is a well-established reality, with success stories like Wikipedia, WordPress and Firefox to show for. But open-source […]
Tests for a specific gene can indicate elevated risk of the disease. But would you really want to know that you may get it?
The Columbia Business School professor thinks the country could be a world leader in solar energy production.
On the 9th of December, Astronomers Madhusudhan, Harrington and colleagues recently discovered a massive gas giant planet, orbiting a star which they have coined the first carbon-rich world ever observed. […]
Raising a country from poverty to affluence should make the nation’s population happier, right? Wrong, according to a new study of 54 countries worldwide.
Prehistoric humans, along with Neanderthals and Homo antecessor, made meals of each other, suggests new research on human teeth marks found on prehistoric human bones.
There are predictions that, like Latin before it, English must inevitably lose its global dominance. The Guardian’s Robert McCrum is not convinced.
Everyone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age, but the purpose and survival value of yawning remain a mystery.
The three most important questions for a nationwide broadband network are: What should the speed be? What will it cost? And how will we pay for it? Craig Settles gives some answers.
Investors’ giddiness over the tech upstarts—and the dozens of other Chinese companies that have gone public in the U.S.—has some wondering whether this boom is really a bubble.
How can we trust a literary guide who, ignorant of the terrain ahead, promises us it will be light and easy? Hillary Kelly objects to Oprah’s positivity charged book club.
Our cosmos was “bruised” in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background.
The amiable idea that language shapes thought has become disconnected, in our popular culture, from any consideration of mere fact, says Mark Liberman of the U of Pennsylvania.
Can modern science help us to create heroes? That’s the lofty question behind the Heroic Imagination Project, a new nonprofit started by Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo.
Obesity is a growing global health problem, and we all know why, don’t we? It’s the fault of corporations that sell corn syrup, and a starkly unequal society (why would […]
A California judge signed off on Festivus as a legit religion: Locked up in a California jail, Malcolm Alarmo King wanted healthier meals. In an argument apparently made to a […]
Who won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2006? Whoever it was, it should have been Julian Assange for this self-description: Thu 29 Jun 2006 : Krill to the […]
War-torn Afghanistan has a long path to healing ahead, but one nonprofit, Business Council for Peace, is quietly pushing things along with a smart social enterprise that trains Afghan women […]
Chances are you have probably never heard of the stem cell tourism industry. This nascent yet growing industry consists of clinics and practitioners in China, Mexico, and Germany who promote […]
Recently, I had the rare opportunity to be on both The Colbert Report and the Conan show. As you can imagine, we had a madcap, hilarious romp through time travel, […]
A shortcoming of Lockean liberalism, the kind of liberty to which the Founders were primarily devoted, is its tendency to undermine the stability of the family over time. As the nation’s […]
Terrorism is not so much a military strategy as a public relations strategy. The aim of terrorists is not to defeat their enemies militarily, but to provoke some kind of […]