Last week, the passing of our modern-day Thomas Edison turned our perpetual baseless ennui into legit reflective sadness.
This year was tough for small business and next year doesn't look much better.
Humans have been doodling in snow, in sand and on cave walls for more than 30,000 years.
Doodling isn't just for kids. Visual thinker Sunni Brown is on a mission to teach everyone about this visual language.
We live in a culture that sends out very mixed messages about mistakes: We're told we learn by making them, but we work mightily to avoid them; that no one's perfect, but goofing-up is bad. So the result is most of us know that we -- as parents, spouses, employers and employees -- are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.
Long before drug cartels, crack wars and TV shows about addiction, cocaine was promoted as a wonder drug, sold as a cure-all and praised by some of the greatest minds in medical history, including Sigmund Freud and the pioneering surgeon William Halsted.
Long before crack, drug wars and celebrity addicts, cocaine was touted as a miracle drug by doctors like Sigmund Freud.
A recently recovered recording from the first-ever talking doll could also be the first-ever commercial recording, historians said after the audio was posted online by the National Parks Service Wednesday.
When I was in high school, my older brother, Bart, was fast on his way to becoming a brilliant physician and pharmacologist. He began to specialize in juvenile oncology, and found himself in need of a device that could administer minute doses of medicine to his infant patients over an extended period of time. Eager to help, I went down into my parents' basement and started building.
Artifacts from the megayacht of 19th-century financier J.P. Morgan are to be sold this weekend at an auction set to reveal how one of America's most influential men enjoyed life aboard his second home on the high seas.
Just because icons like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison aren't alive today, doesn't mean their leadership lessons should be forgotten. And since history always repeats itself, there is some career advice that never seems to change.
Ray Kurzweil predicts a dawn of total artificial intelligence in the not-so-distant future. Go to VBS.TV for more.
In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological humans. We will be able to absorb and retain the entirety of the universe's knowledge, eat as much as we want without gaining weight, shape-shift into just about any physical form imaginable, live free from disease and die at the time of our choosing. All of this will be thrust on us by something that Kurzweil calls the Singularity, a theorized point in time in the not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in every way, aka the emergence of true artificial intelligence. Computers will be able to improve their own source codes and hardware in ways we puny humans could never conceive. This will result in a paradigm shift that sees mankind coalescing with its own creations: man and machine, merging into one.
Ahh, Thanksgiving -- a time to reflect on all that is good in our lives and express our gratitude for it. And, of course, for snarky journalists to take seasonal advantage of the word "turkey."
Human progress requires good ideas.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday challenged Senate Republicans to back a bill that would help small businesses, calling its provisions "things the Republican Party has said it supported for years."
There are burglar bars on the windows of Second Mount Olive Baptist Church. It takes a good shove to open its rusty metal door, identical to all the other offices in this rundown strip mall just off the highway in south Atlanta.
At an auction at a gallery in New York recently, a piece of artwork sold for a higher price than had been anticipated by the auctioneers: $4,080.
So now the government's going to tell you what light bulb to buy, and it could be hazardous to your health.
FSB: Meet the new bossupdated: Tue Aug 25 2009 11:03:00
The Great Recession won't last forever, but no matter what comes next, business as usual is clearly over.
Memorial Day weekend has arrived: the symbolic, if not the official, beginning of summer.
Agatha Christie was a painfully shy girl, so her mom homeschooled her even though her two older siblings attended private school.
Privilege can be a dangerous thing. It releases you from the task of thinking about things that others must. I am an African-American male and I am privileged. Not on race; but on gender, education, religion, income and many other areas.
There is a quick-acting miracle cure for weariness that won't cost you a dime. It's called a nap.
In the whole history of the Olympics, only four American swimmers have achieved lasting celebrity. Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe went on to Hollywood as Tarzan; Eleanor Holm, gorgeous and notorious, starred in the World's Fair Aquacade; and Mark Spitz won all those golds at Munich in 1972. Now, maybe Michael Phelps will become number five. We'll see. But, except for a little accident of history, Sunny Boy Kiefer would definitely have been included in that exalted group.
In the new wikiworld, the Internet brings together a man with a plan, companies with money and an international network of brainiacs to power a new light
Andy Karsner was in an ebullient mood the other day, and for good reason. Congress had just approved an energy bill, which, despite serious flaws, puts the country on a path that will promote renewable energy, reduce our dependence on oil, dramatically increase energy efficiency and curb the growth in greenhouse gas emissions.
Even the most cheerless environmental activist would find it hard not to register the faintest trace of a smile at seeing Christmas lights shimmering in the murk of a December evening.
"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." -- Thomas Edison
As a species, we've hit the bedtime barrier. You can eat at your desk, socialize in the break room, and answer text messages on a date, but sooner or later, you're going to have to sleep.
When high-tech analyst Jack Whelan relaxesat night, he likes to curl up with some riveting reading - an RCA annual report, say, from 1948. "These reports are a good source of research," notes the co-founder of Alpha1Watch in Boston, pointing to a pile dating from 1949 to 1955. "I'm always going back to study them."
Everyone from Wal-Mart (Change a Light, Change the World) to Yahoo (www.18seconds.org) to the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (How Many Jews Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?) wants you to buy compact fluorescent light bulbs to help save the planet.
From space exploration to long-lasting light bulbs, black men and women of science have significantly altered American society. The following is just a sampling of African Americans who have saved and changed lives by breaking new ground in science and technology.
Business 2.0: The Next Disruptorsupdated: Thu Dec 21 2006 13:44:00
The Work of Clayton Christensen The guru who gave disruptive technology its name wrote three books that are required reading. Start with The Innovator's Dilemma (1997), then try The Innovator's Sol...
We think of magic as puckish, elegant, lighter than air, but in "The Prestige," an aggressively devious sleight-of-hand thriller directed by Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins), the magic, even at its most clever, is powered by currents -- sometimes literal ones -- of electricity and danger.
Charles Batcheldor was an English machinist. John Kruesi was a Swiss clockmaker. Ludwig Boehm was a German glassblower. Francis Upton was a Princeton-trained mathematician. They were drawn to the t...
These teams made business history. How did they do it?
Whether you're on a summer business trip or stealing a little time for a weekend getaway, chances are you'll be spending more than a few hours flying this season. And what better time to get in some good reading?
He did his best work after dark, when the world was still and he could blow off steam on the office pipe organ. Around midnight Thomas Edison and his team would break for pie, ham, beer, and group ...
What is the universe made of? According to a new list, it is one of the most important questions of our time -- and we could conceivably know the answer in the foreseeable future.
PRACTICAL INNOVATION--FROM THE STEAM engine to the search engine--is the principal reason America achieved preeminence while other well-endowed land masses lagged or failed. Innovation is not simpl...
On a Sunday evening in 1879, Thomas Edison and his assistants powered up an electric bulb and took turns watching it. Over the past 18 months their quest for a workable filament had generated nothi...
On a lovely morning in May 1994, Barnett Helzberg Jr. was walking past the Plaza Hotel in New York City when he heard someone yell, "Mr. Buffett!" Helzberg turned and saw a woman in a red dress tal...
You've just had that magical "AHA": A brilliant idea for a brand-new something-or-other. Congratulations. Now for the hard part, because when Thomas Edison said genius is 99 percent perspiration, h...
Fortune: The Business Lifeupdated: Mon Sep 17 2001 00:01:00
Thomas Edison famously said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Almost as famously, Woody Allen said 80% of success should actually be credited to showing up. What neither took into acco...
It was a wondrous place and a heady time--the great Exposition of 1904. It was the Meet Me in St. Louis fair, about which Judy Garland would one day sing, "Don't tell me the lights are shining anyp...
It was a wondrous place and a heady time, the great Exposition of 1904. It was the Meet Me in St. Louis fair, where, as Judy Garland would one day sing, "Don't tell me the lights are shining any pl...
There are lots of ways to make money in America, always have been. One is to start young, keep your eye on the dollar, and try, try again until you finally come up with something people will pay fo...
CORNING (GLW) NYSE, $45; 1.6% YIELD
Would you consult Madonna on building an aircraft carrier? Or Roseanne on maintaining a stable relationship with ex-husbands? If you think about it, which you won't, you might suppose that although...
It is an evening much like any other. You are having dinner with your family, fork poised above that first portion of tasty microwaved tuna, when the telephone rings. Your 10-year-old answers it. "...
So you're rummaging through your attic, and you run across an old canceled stock certificate. Dust it off. If the certificate was issued before 1930 and, in the custom of the day, hand signed by th...
States have long been notorious for the zero-sum game called smokestack chasing, in which they compete for factories by offering tax breaks and facilities. But the recession of 1982 brought somethi...
INVESTING Q. I recently purchased Citicorp stock directly from the company, without brokers' fees. Do other firms offer such direct purchases? Erik Schneider Sacramento
He grew up in Shanghai, but An Wang's heroes were allAmerican: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Orville and Wilbur Wright. In March, Wang, 68, who founded Wang Laboratories in 1951, joined tha...
Atlantic Richfield has a problem: What to do with 10.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas located in a remote deposit on Alaska's North Slope? Natural gas fetches $4.60 per 1,000 cubic feet, but mo...
Just a century ago the U.S. was struck by a mighty wave of industrialization that was to make it the world's supreme economic power. Hundreds of giant corporations came into being, and with them an...
THE FARGO, North Dakota, Forum has begun publishing what may be the cleanest newspaper in the U.S. It is accomplishing this not by censorship but by using a new smudgeless ink concocted by a small ...
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