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In his new book, How to Create a Mind, engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil puts forth a theory of the brain that is meant to demonstrate how engineers could build a computer that would mimic the mind.

The workforce at GM was pretty disheartened when the company hit hard times during the recent recession. And yet, GM employees wanted to prove to everybody that they could design, […]

Elizabeth Stark describes how Internet activism stopped legislation such as SOPA, which she saw as a threat to online freedom.

Charles Mrray designed this quiz to have a salutary effect on bringing to people’s attention the degree to which they live in a bubble that seals them off from an […]

Penn Jillette: I don’t think Daniel Kahneman knew he was writing a magic book. I don’t think he knew he was writing about Celebrity Apprentice. But he might have.

Creating full citizenship isn’t about getting people from 0 to 60. It’s about everything in between. If 60 is voting and most people are at 10, Rishi Jaitly says it […]

Cynthia Breazeal showcases “an idea in its formation,” that is, providing children in remote areas with tablets and learning apps that could enable them to teach themselves how to read.

What are the things that I want to remember and that I want to be able to access later on and focus on remembering how to access them? And then […]

Don’t just look at the short term numbers, says business turnaround expert Fred Hassan. Success starts at the level of company culture.

“Strong opinion’s aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate […]

The five stages of grief have become the stuff of pop psychology but disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance do not always follow each other in an orderly procession. 

David Gergen, Lisa New and Chris Matthews weigh in on the question of America’s Exceptionalism.

Once thought to be determined by the biology of the ear, music appreciation is more a matter of training, say researchers. Each musical genre plays by its own set of internal rules.

A restaurant near the city of Sapporo has implemented a new policy of charging customers who do not eat all their dinner, highlighting the need to cultivate a positive relationship with food. 

Sharing might be the defining characteristic of being human. We are also very good at learning from others. The problem, however, is that we lack the proper filters and are […]

Just as you wouldn’t want to pick a baseball player for your team without an adequate record of past performance, you wouldn’t want to pick a leader by taking a […]

If you’re worried about the fact that you’re in a relationship with a psychopath, what can you do about that? What might be some certain things to look out for?

Abraham Lincoln’s humility comes from a lot of places, but it probably starts with his sense of empathy.

We used to live in a world where content producers chose the channels of distribution. Now the consumers choose.* That means the producer has to deliver the message over many […]

Recently appointed director of the venerable Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Joshua Bell is trying to make classical music accessible to younger audiences without dumbing it down.

Bell describes Beethoven’s 4th and 7th symphonies as joyful music, in contrast to the cliché of the composer as primarily gloomy and intense.

In some ways we’re doing better than science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted we would.

What do you get when you add the total matter of the universe to the total energy of the universe? Zero. “So it takes no energy to create a universe,” Dr. Kaku points out. “A universe is a free lunch.”

How can you create a universe from nothing? Well if you calculate the total matter of the universe it is positive. If you calculate the total energy of the universe […]

One of the unfinished pieces of business from the Cold War is the question of the unification of the Korean Peninsula.

The last thing we want to do is water down the teaching of biology because some people don’t recognize that evolution happened.

Jonathan Zittrain, speaking at the 2012 Nantucket Project, describers how crowdsourcing is being used to solve all kinds of problems, and how it can be used for good and well […]

Overcoming the myths of happiness might make life seem more complicated, but it’s the only way to stop interfering with our own potential to be happy.

Lawrence Krauss argues for differential pay scales for teachers with advanced training in science and math to accommodate the free market.

How can we train our brains to think like Sherlock Holmes? This question occupies Konnikova’s book, and her answer can be summed up in one word: mindfulness. Mindfulness is “staying […]