And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from or...
Cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties, she wrote. They get their order from below; they are le...
Broad Street marked the first time in history when a reasonable person might have surveyed the state of urban life and come to the conclusion that cities would someday become great conquerers of disea...
Darwin was constantly rereading his notes, discovering new implications.
The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a s...
Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.
If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence...
The more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
Keeping a slow hunch alive poses challenges on multiple scales. For starters, you have to preserve the hunch in your own memory,
To a certain extent, Ruef’s and Burt’s research is a validation of the celebrated strength of weak ties argument first proposed by Mark Granovetter,
Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver ba...
They mistook the smoke for the fire.
It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other.
Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning disks for the eyes. Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called lenses.
Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.
When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news a...
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market...
One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
How do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people whil...
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