The Reinventing Media session at Techonomy this morning had a somewhat different tone than many of the others here: It was tinged with sadness. There is a lot of hurt in the media world today, a lot of pain. And…the Internet did it. The traditional print media industry has been... Continue reading

About seven years ago, I reported regularly on the science of longevity, and the prospect of human life extension, for a site called Sage Crossroads. And then I stopped—pretty much dropping the topic for a while and going on to other things. So when I attended the Techonomy session yesterday... Continue reading

In a breakout session here at Techonomy, David Keith of the University of Calgary and Margaret Leinen of the Climate Response Fund led a discussion of the prospect of geoengineering the climate—in other words, engaging in some type of deliberate intervention to alter the planet and thereby counteract global warming.... Continue reading

Amory Lovins bursts with so many ideas that if you blink you miss ten of them. Speaking at Techonomy today, he outlined an agenda he called Reinventing Fire--nothing less than obliterating all oil and gas usage by 2050. “We do transformation, not incrementalism,” Lovins explained. Yeah. You can read some... Continue reading

Yesterday at Techonomy--before the fun started--we heard from Stewart Brand, famed founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author most recently of Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. With his latest book, Brand is pioneering a new brand of environmentalism that discards some of the movement’s anti-technology habits, and reacquaints... Continue reading

At the official opening plenary session of Techonomy, Kevin Kelly--a co-founder of Wired, and author of the forthcoming book What Technology Wants--made what I considered a pretty profound remark. “The first animal we domesticated was humans,” Kelly said. He went on to describe how we “physically changed ourselves through agriculture,... Continue reading

Unlike my fellow blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick, I don't have anything too astute to say about the opening pre-conference workshop of Techonomy—hosted by the World Economic Forum and entitled “How to measure the impact and transformational power of technology?” But I do have a remark on how sophisticated conversations like this... Continue reading

This is my first post on the Techonomy blog, so I mainly want to introduce myself. I’m Chris Mooney, a blogger for Discover and author of several books about the relationship between science and politics, and how things sometimes go dramatically splat in this area. So I may seem, in... Continue reading