Technology & Innovation

New wearable devices like Google’s Project Glass and forthcoming smart watches will open community businesses by advertising directly to people who already like their products. 

A new method for extracting energy from solar panels will allow expensive silicon semiconductors to be replaced by much cheaper metals, making the energy source more cost effective. 

There has been a lot of noise recently surronding the prospects of virtual reality. With Google Glasses being showcased last month at the Google I/O conference, it seems – at the least […]

What’s the Big Idea? Your colleague asks whether you agree with her perspective on a key issue, forcing you to take sides. Your six-year-old throws a fit just before bedtime, […]

By the year 2020, the world’s leading maker of wireless network equipment estimates that machines will interface with other machines more often than they will interact with humans.

The best mobile devices of tomorrow will “embed” your identity, says Rebekah Cox, product designer at Quora and formerly of Facebook. Identity, she says, comes down to communication. 

The problem of having too much information at your fingertips was a problem the poet and novelist Percy Shelley was already aware of by the 19th century. He proposed a solution…

So deeply rooted, says Tom Doctoroff, is the Western belief in individual freedom, that it is nearly impossible for us to accept the fact that in Chinese culture, the individual does not exist outside of her network of familial and communal obligations. 

What’s the Big Idea? Until the 1980s, the scientific consensus was that the nervous system was fixed and incapable of regeneration. Growth of neurons was considered most active during prenatal […]

A British man convicted of sending a “menacing” Tweet has been exonerated by appealing to a law passed in 1935. How will our legal system ever accommodate the speed of technology? 

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food production will need to increase at least 50 percent in order to meet the demand of a vastly growing world population.

According to the International AIDS Society, out of the world’s 34 million people infected with the HIV virus very few are actually receiving the necessary treatment to control the disease.  

What’s the Big Idea? Lionel Richie is a meme phenomenon. His music video “Hello” has inspired countless people to share both image and video pastiches of him all over the internet. […]

Physicists at the UK’s National Physics Laboratory have created a device which could be scaled to store numerous ion-based quantum bits, paving the way for a quantum computer microchip. 

Scaremail fights government surveillance with the power of nonsense.

An increasing number of American businesses are recognizing the competitive necessity of building and retaining an engaged workforce. Even in a recession, the most talented people will always be attracted to roles at companies where their efforts are clearly appreciated and rewarded. 

The Justice Department maintains that Apple’s agreement with major publishers over how it markets e-books prevents its competitors from setting prices that would benefit consumers. 

Facebook’s new manager of energy efficiency and sustainability wants to develop apps that allow users to share and compare their energy use with friends, leveraging the power of friendship.

The economic situation seems to be improving, but many Americans think differently.  Is the U.S. recovering or headed for another recession?

The economic state of mind for many countries, and the actual status of the country’s economic state don’t always match up.

With respect to the cosmos, mankind has just been born. Hypothetically, if our 14 billion-year-old universe were scaled down to just 10 years (for the sake of comparison), dinosaurs would […]

While trials show that the new HIV-prevention pill reduces the likelihood of transmitting the virus, doctors worry that misdiagnoses and poor compliance will result in a drug-resistant HIV.

Advanced robotics could allow virtually any profession to form part of the globalized economy. By adopting avatars, workers could travel to any part of the world, all from their living room.

Human-run institutions have had a spectacularly poor track record at monitoring the activity of the world’s largest banks, so companies are turning to artificial intelligence instead. 

The hiring and managing of employees is the achilles heel of many an otherwise tightly-run organization. Why? Because human beings come with many more variables than do widgets – we’re trickier to assess, our motivations are complex, and we change over time. 

Even the smartest people make irrational choices, says Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize-winning psychologist. Here’s why — and what you can do about it.

When human biology becomes indistinguishable from its machine parts, in an event known as the Singularity, we will transcend human intelligence, but will we also transcend our feelings?

Social and mobile networking tools are helping to build financially-independent communities by facilitating informal trading markets. The services are a response to international banking crises. 

Romi Haan on why entrepreneurs need to understand sales, and how she succeeded anyway.

What’s the Big Idea? Ever wonder how Michael Jordan came to be the best basketball player that ever lived? Unlike the stories we hear of many world champions who set […]