Guest Thinkers — February 22, 2011

Meet 24 top innovators

In a feature called Innovators at the Gate, FORTUNE magazine recently profiled 24 disruptive innovators, including Craig Venter (the guy who helped map the human genome), Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons of Yelp, legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors: “Call them innovators, entrepreneurs, or good

old-fashioned trouble-makers. These 24 disrupters have gone up against

the odds as they’ve rattled old industries and tried to create new ones.” Eberhard, for example, is attempting to build a car with the performance of a Ferrari, but more than twice the fuel efficiency of a Toyota Prius.

ASIDE: If you’re reading this issue of FORTUNE magazine offline, the title has another, more subtle meaning. In addition to referencing the business classic Barbarians at the Gate, the title also refers to the fact that the magazine feature is a gate fold, like this or this.

[image: Craig Venter]

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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