To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems? IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to

MIT researchers develop tool to assess regional risks of climate change, potential impacts on local infrastructure and planning. Climate scientists cannot attribute any single weather event — whether a drought, wildfire or extreme storm —

The Mayor’s Challenge is a contest run by Bloomberg Philanthropies to find the best ideas bubbling out of our cities–from data mining to turning foreclosed houses into urban farms. It’s a theme that we’ve touched

Why spend billions on restringing, burying, or waterproofing power lines?  True post-storm resilience lies in onsite renewable energy. Last week, 8.5 million people in the Northeast lost power, most for days, due to Hurricane Sandy.

Rather Than Reinventing Education By Teaching A Million People At Once, Can We Perfect Teaching One Person At A Time? We’ve written a few times about innovation in education, and I’ve pointed out that I

A new manufacturing technique could help poor countries as well as rich ones EVERY summer, Seattle holds a raft race in Green Lake, a park that is the eponymous home of the water the rafts

For decades, “bigger is better” has been the conventional path to efficiency in industries ranging from transportation to power generation. Food once grown on small family plots now comes overwhelmingly from factory farms. Vessels that

The Coming Age of Enhancement IF a brain implant were safe and available and allowed you to operate your iPad or car using only thought, would you want one? What about an embedded device that

Frangioni’s approach is quite different. One of the main forces driving the move to open access is the idea that if the public has already paid for research through taxation or philanthropy, then it’s not

The key to learning, Negroponte’s fellow panelists agreed, is to engage children rather than simply talk at them. Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Many people cite Albert Einstein’s aphorism “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Only a handful, however, have had the

This is incredible. Taken by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, this 108,500×81,500-pixel image is an interesting case study for Olbers’ Paradox. Containing nearly 9 billion