The Clock of the Long Now
We can often find ourselves living for the moment instead of in it. Prompted by this fast (and getting faster) lifestyle of our world, a handful of key high-tech thinkers from San Francisco recently created the Long Now Foundation to provide a counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. Read this essay by a founding member of Long Now on The Ten Thousa... posted on Aug 13 2006, 3,150 reads

12 Year Old Who Doesn't Age
Brooke Greenberg has celebrated 12 birthdays according to the calendar but in terms of growing up, she has yet to reach her first! To the mystification of the medical world, Brooke is frozen in time, a real-life, female Peter Pan. She weighs 13lb and measures 27 inches, and looks and acts as if she were a six-month-old baby, not a girl about to become a teenager.... posted on Aug 09 2006, 4,249 reads

The Boy Who Sees with Sound
Ben Underwood doesn't seem to know he's blind. There's Ben zooming around on his skateboard outside his home in Sacramento; there he is playing kickball with his buddies. To see him speed down hallways and make sharp turns around corners is to observe a typical teen –- except, that is, for the clicking. Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes, Ben has lear... posted on Aug 02 2006, 2,863 reads

Taking a Class in Happiness
Some 2,000 pupils at English state schools are to have special classes in happiness under a pilot scheme aimed at cutting depression, self-harm and anti-social behaviour. "The move comes as experts warn that record numbers of young people are on the verge of mental breakdown as a result of family break-up, exam pressures and growing inability to cope with the pressures of modern life," the report... posted on Jul 28 2006, 2,411 reads

Six Degrees of Interconnection
When searching for a job or solving difficult problems at work, we routinely make use of our social connections. When making decisions about restaurants to visit, or tech stocks to buy, we pay attention to the advice and actions of friends. And when our computer gets infected by the latest virus, our contacts are the ones most at risk. At the heart of it all is a network of relationships through w... posted on Jun 29 2006, 2,622 reads

The World's Most Courteous City
We hear a lot about how common courtesy is a dying art form. Recently Readers Digest conducted a survey to find out if good manners are indeed going out of style. Contrary to popular belief they found civility was alive and well -- in a place where you’d least expect it: New York City! Survey-takers in major cities across 35 countries used three experiments: "door tests" (would anyone hold one o... posted on Jun 27 2006, 1,941 reads

South American Twist in Time
Einstein proved that time was relative, but he may not even have known about this: researchers studying the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people found that speakers often simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be said about it! Scientists realized that the Aymara actually have a concept of time opposite to all the wo... posted on Jun 15 2006, 2,761 reads

Music of Rosslyn Chapel
For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the Rosslyn chapel. Now, Stuart Mitchell thinks he's cracked part of the code of the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes. The breakthrough came when Mitchell's father discovered that the markings matched a pattern that forms when a sustained musical note is used to vibrate a sheet of met... posted on Jun 09 2006, 2,552 reads

Urban Takes Over Rural
Sometime this year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time ... posted on Jun 02 2006, 1,734 reads

Island School
What if the environment was your schoolroom? At the Island School in the Bahamas, it is. Students there find themselves up to their knees in mud while exploring a mangrove creek, face to face with a coral reef 40 feet underwater, or holding a 700 year old pottery shard. As active participants in the educational process, students are taught to think like scientists, cultural historians, and teac... posted on May 20 2006, 3,677 reads