Like San Francisco's iconic cable cars, a new system of cable trucks is set to be installed between the port of Long Beach and Los Angeles, cutting emissions by as much as 30%. 

Art isn’t usually a life or death matter, but the controversy over South African artist Brett Murray’s The Spear (detail shown above) might end in bloodshed. When Murray decided to […]

It’s easy to see why, for most of human history, a creative insight was thought of as a divine spirit that came from “some distant and unknowable source, for distant […]

SpaceX's successful rocket launch is the proof of concept not only for private space missions but for an entirely new economy based on taking individuals and businesses to and from space. 

Our anxiety about information overload is unwarranted, says James Gleick, even in the digital age. The internet will cause a readjustment in the way we think, but so did the […]

After SpaceX's successful rocket launch, its founder is riding high. But the space visionary nearly went broke investing nearly all his money into the company after selling PayPal. 

Big-idea start ups are not dead, says GigaOm's Derrick Harris. They've just moved to the cloud, where scalable technology allows companies--and individuals--to innovate like never before. 

Larger than the threat of global warming is feeding humanity's ever-expanding population. Already, we use 40% of dry land on Earth to produce food. Are we simply running out of planet?

Today the Friends of Yemen met in Riyadh.  One of the key issues, as it often is at these meetings, is that of foreign aid. Several days ago a group […]

The “great convergence” that began with the emergence of the Asian Tigers, accelerated with explosive growth in China and India, and continues today with numerous other countries spanning the globe—all within the past five decades or so—then it was far from preordained.  

After being written off by a team of European astronomers, dark matter has made a surprise comeback thanks to the training and support of two researchers from New Jersey. 

European scientists who want to begin experimenting with geoengineering are being met with a host of concerns, including those of philosophers who worry about manipulating nature. 

An angelic lady from the pre-raphaelite school of femmes fatales is stretched across a map of Europe. Her raised hands clutch a sketch of the late-19th-century European rail network at two of […]

On Mother’s Day, in a sermon to his flock at the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, Pastor Charles Worley revealed his plan to rid America of its homosexuals: […]

As you may be aware, this past Sunday was Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, in which freethinkers are exhorted to draw pictures of Mohammed to reaffirm their right to free expression […]

The Boston Review is hosting a forum centered the claim of Michael Sandel,  a Harvard political theorist, that "markets crowd out morals." Sandel's essay is well worth reading. He clearly gives voice to […]

With state and local governments still suffering from a persistent deficit of tax revenues due to the moribund economic recovery, smart politicians are looking ahead and lobbying for spaceport development […]

We’ve long been fascinated by the endless streams of data available in the world around us, and we especially love to try to make sense of them. 

Are we somehow becoming "more than human"? 

Kids, want to be an artist when you grow up? We’ve got a check-list for how to tell your parents. Parents, oh no, you accidentally raised an artist? Don’t despair: […]