The Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for the Future have invited gamers from all walks of life to join them on the Catalysts for Change platform to help identify new solutions to global poverty. Participants will leverage 140-character messages to play a game of cards, with each card capturing an idea. Game participants will use…
Increasing production and declining consumption of oil and gas have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid…
In public forums about the drastic changes that higher ed may undergo in the coming years, one question inevitably gets asked of those advocating market disruption: Would the alternatives to the traditional degree pathway be good enough for their own children? The underlying concern in the question, of course, is that disruption in academe could…
Information security experts believe the blurring of the boundaries between computer and biological viruses is not too far-fetched—and could have very real consequences. The origins of each virus are strikingly different: A computer virus is designed, whereas a biological virus evolves under pressure from natural selection. But what would happen if these origins are switched?…
Every election year, political candidates of all stripes are called “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.” In a recent column, Washington Post pundit Kathleen Parker asks if it’s fair that many U.S. women see the Republican party in precisely those terms. Barbara King’s question: Is that fair to the Neanderthals? King explains why Neanderthals weren’t at all the cartoonish,…
One giant step towards ‘creating a miniature star on Earth’
A dread of malevolent spirits haunting forsaken areas could, along with environmental catastrophes, help to explain why some areas in the ancient Mayan world proved less resilient than others when their civilization disintegrated, researchers suggest. The ancient Maya once claimed an area about the size of Texas, with cities and fields that occupied what is…
While plenty of question marks still hang over the prospect of carbon capture and storage, MIT believes it’s ruled out one: the United States, it says, has enough capacity in its deep saline aquifers to store at least a century’s fossil fuel emissions. In the past, estimates of America’s capacity have ranged from enough to…
As much as we’re enjoying these halcyon early spring days of bare legs and light breezes, perfect al fresco weather, and walking jacketless through the park, we are also worried. Worried about what it means. Worried about what our perfect March will mean once we reach June. After all, we’ve still got three months, and…
T. Boone Pickens promotes natural gas for energy security and as a bridge to alternatives in this 2012 TED talk.