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We could be much more pro-active in lessening our impact on the environment. Energy-efficient cars and “passive houses” can make a real difference.

Imagine how different your life would be if next Earth Day a year from now, you supplied the power to this computer—by pedaling, churning or dancing. The way these students […]

Each of us consumes energy at a rate roughly equivalent to a 100-watt bulb. But, given the amount of energy that goes into maintaining domestic farm animals, and the inanimate […]

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat; it saved the marriage. Curiosity is the single most important trait in finding a good date or life-partner, writes psychologist Paul Dobransky.

Readers have asked for more original photography at Focal Point. I’m happy to oblige. Here’s a fun photo for the weekend, taken during my recent trip to St. John’s, Newfoundland. […]

Researchers have found that bees see the world nearly five times as quickly as humans do, helping them to navigate through bushes and find food.

Iran has announced its development of faster centrifuges for enriching uranium but the advance, while scientifically significant, may not alter the political landscape.

Synthetic biologists have discovered new chemical reactions that could “rewire” plants to more efficiently process carbon dioxide—allowing crops to grow to enormous size.

Today we take a computer’s speed for granted, but it wasn’t so long ago when it was normal to sit and wait for several minutes every time we booted up […]

The defining image of the BP oil spill is a suspiciously low resolution video feed from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The much maligned Huffington Post seems to […]

Today we release the second installment from our interview with Bjørn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. In this clip he talks about the issue of sustainability in a world […]

Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, is on record as having said that he can’t imagine oil being more than $30 a barrel by […]

It is an event with which I am slightly ashamed—and even the excuse that it happened over twenty years ago and that I was only a bit player does not […]

Silicon Valley startup Bloom Energy has unveiled new technology which can “harnesses chemical reactions to create energy” in the hope of revolutionizing the world’s fuel sources.

Washington’s plans for a forward-thinking energy policy have been gutted due to the recession and name games that turned cap-and-trade into cap-and-tax.

Reemergence of nuclear power in America’s energy future has renewed interest in fast-neutron reactors which can use nuclear waste in the process of energy production.

Clicking “Like” on a Facebook page won’t meet the challenges that face our times, quips an editorial in The Christian Science Monitor.

The reason we haven’t innovated enough in energy technology is because energy used to be cheap.

Research suggests that a gigantic network of offshore wind power stations along the Eastern seaboard could potentially provide energy to a large swath of the U.S. without much threat of outages.

Did we miss a utopia or avoid a disaster?

In energy technology, it’s clear if your invention works or not. Either the device saves energy and people buy it and find out, or it doesn’t.

Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham came by Big Think a few weeks ago to discuss cooking and all of its evolutionary implications. Did you know that cooking is a huge influence […]

New protostars that will eventually be 10 times as large as the sun have been discovered in the massive Rosette molecular cloud, 5,000 light years away.

n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]

How designers are revolutionizing product packaging, one of consumerism’s most toxic and wasteful byproducts, by using smart engineering and innovative materials to dramatically lighten its carbon footprint.

What kinds of incentives are necessary to get people to lead more environmentally responsible lives?  Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N. International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, says that we […]

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about the Large Hadron Collider in the news lately. After 16 years the LHC seems to be in the headlines each week, breaking speed, […]

Some of the Sky Tran’s key technologies can be applied to wind energy.

Faced with climate change, some birds are changing their migration schedules and staying closer to home — and in the future they might stop migrating altogether.

Is there anything we can do about the global increase in tropical storms? Ernst Weizsäcker, co-chair of the U.N.’s International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, thinks Hurricane Katrina may have […]