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China has taken an important step in building a space station by 2020 and an American aerospace engineer says China will own the moon in 15 years. Is this a new space race?

Book publishers have largely been silent on privacy but now one is suing 27 people for distributing its books on BitTorrent. A similar strategy won the music industry few fans.

Two interesting case studies of videos that went viral: one was followed by 1 million online product sales and the other translated into none. The difference? A call to action and a link.

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has called on Apple to help the “dying record business” by supporting new talent, instead of bleeding musicians like a “digital vampire”.

Qaddafi was not the worst of the modern world’s dictators, but few were as vain and capricious, and in recent times only Fidel Castro reigned longer. What is his legacy in Libya?  

In a bizarre twist to Mexico’s drug war, an international group of online hackers has warned a drug cartel to release one of its members, or see its private details published.

Twitter exploded last night when news about payoffs to former employees of the National Restaurant Association who had accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment during his tenure hit POLITICO’s front […]

Will China become the banker to the rest of the world? Here’s why the E.U. can’t rely on the U.S. but could rely on China to help bail it out of its  liquidity crisis.

“Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!” The black and white picture from the fifties of a teenaged white girl yelling racial epithets at a young black coed […]

Studies show that people who believe that intelligence can improve with time and effort are more likely to bounce back from failure than those who view their abilities as fixed. Why?

The scientific study of dreams is known as oneirology. Rather than being concerned with what dreams mean, it is more interested in the processes that give rise to dreams. 

The X Prize Foundation will offer a $10 million prize to the first team that significantly boosts the speed and accuracy of D.N.A. sequencing, which could open wide new medical horizons. 

Are you a Big Thinker? Are you a Serial Thinker? Are you always the first person to offer your opinion? Then there’s a good chance you’re an Ice Breaker. You […]

In this portion of his Floating University lecture, activist investor William Ackman talks about investing in the kind of company that you can own forever. In other words, what is […]

According to physician and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the major problem with health care in the U.S. is the country spends twice as much on health care as […]

The principle of presidential campaigns run by Ross Perot, Steve Forbes and now Herman Cain is that politics are broken and only a business leader can repair them. True?

If one walks into any school in the United States, it is obvious that digital technologies are pervasive. It is impossible not to see students using laptops or netbooks, tablets […]

Occupy St Paul’s! This isn’t the slogan of those who have followed in the wake of the Wall Street protestors, but London’s eponymous cathedral is now surrounded by a tent […]

In addition to demotivating talented workers, an opaque and dictatorial leadership style can silence innovation from below, leaving the leader in charge of coming up with all the great ideas.

The Floating University’s first course, Great Big Ideas: An Entire Undergraduate Education While Standing On One Foot, is being used to teach courses at Harvard, Yale, and Bard this fall […]

A new online course that is currently being offered at Harvard, Yale and Bard is threatening to disrupt higher education as we know it. As tuition costs continue to skyrocket, […]

Software has enabled one utility company to cut power consumption by up to 50 percent by more intelligently managing the delivery of electricity to homes and businesses. 

Apple’s patent war rages on against Samsung and Google but in what sense has something been stolen from Apple? Timothy Lee says strict patent laws harm the common good. 

To be a successful investor you have to be able to avoid some natural human tendencies to follow the herd. You have to have a stomach to withstand the volatility […]

When will we be able to enter a room and create an imaginary scenario so realistic that it seems as if we are really there? Sooner than you think, says […]

Ultimately, space could collapse back in on itself, destroying all stars and galaxies in existence, or it could expand into essentially an endless void.

Robert Scoble on why it’s more interesting on Google+ than Twitter or Facebook: because it’s for finding, and talking with, the people who are interested in the same thing you are.

Amazon, aggressively expanding its publishing efforts, can sell a lot of books. But many writers don’t want to publish to an algorithm, they care about making culture and art.

“I was fighting a lot of people’s expectations of what comedy was and who should be delivering the jokes,” says Margaret Cho. But if you really want to do something, […]