A first-of-its-kind “crowdsourced and crowdfunded” archaeological dig at Cambridgeshire’s Flag Fen has finished. It is the site of a Bronze-Age “causeway” of millions of preserved timbers that are rotting away as groundwater recedes from the site. The not-for-profit Digventures team raised £27,000 from members of the public who then joined in an expert-led dig to…
Talk about the pursuit of happiness. Several cities and states are are already looking into citizen well-being or floating happiness initiatives as a measure of true prosperity. Yet defining, let alone measuring, happiness (and its counterpoint, misery) is no simple matter. Critics scoff at the idea, suggesting that it’s a fool’s errand.
Check out this high-rise in France’s Boulogne-Billancourt re-imagined as an urban eco-village, bursting with greenery. The Natural Evolution building proposal (which comes via eVolo) was developed in response for the increasing need for high-density housing in urban areas. In accordance with that vision, it was developed for Boulogne-Billancourt, the most populous suburb of Paris and…
From David Barash’s post, The Hare, the Tortoise, and the Aurora Madman, in reaction to the tragedy in Colorado, from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog: Far more than any other critter, we Homo saps are stuck between two worlds, biological evolution and cultural evolution. The former is a Darwinian, genetic process, necessarily slow…
Innovation researcher Maria Clara Couto Soares calls for a new debate on expanding the reach of grassroots social innovations.
International talks to address human-caused global warming began 20 years ago in Rio de Janeiro. But despite attempts to curb emissions of the greenhouse gases responsible, they have continued to pour into the atmosphere since then. Last year was no exception. In 2011, the burning of fossil fuels, as well as other activities such as…
Are conservative intellectuals anti-intellectual? The short answer must be no. Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Harvey Mansfield, Wilfred M. McClay—conservative thinkers have championed scholarship, learning, and history. The long answer, however, is more ambiguous. Confronted by social upheavals, conservative intellectuals tend to blame other intellectuals—socialist, liberal, secular—as the cause. They perceive political unrest as…
Gen Xers are surprisingly blasé about climate change. A survey in 2009 found members of Generation X were largely disengaged from climate change. Two years later, these American adults became slightly more so, a follow-up survey has revealed. Americans in this age group generally are not well-informed about climate change, nor are they highly concerned…
Amid a cascade of comment on the decline of mainline Protestantism, an historian argues that a great progressive tradition is in the throes of renewal
Punishment helps discourage the dishonest from destroying the fabric of cooperative human societies. But that’s not what you actually think about when you feel the urge to punish a rule-breaker. Scientists have long debated what motivates humans’ deep-seated desire for retaliation, which we’ll carry out even at great personal cost. New research published in the…