Institute For The Future

Will Your Bacon be Caffeinated?

Far be it for me, as someone who is on a quest to find caffeinated breakfast food, to question the wisdom of fortifying anything with caffeine, but I...

Automation's Impact on the Job Market

Current US unemployment figures are likely to persist into the foreseeable future as a result of two technological forces: communication and desktop...

Coming Soon: Personal Neuroscience?

...

Seeing is Believing

From time to time, my colleague Jake Dunagan cites a study showing that the image of a brain makes people more likely to believe that whatever they're...

FutureCast: Dr. Thomas Perls on Centenarians (Dec 2, 11am PT)

Join Vivian Distler in conversation with Dr. Thomas Perls, founder and director of the New England Centenarian Study, the largest study of...

The Neuroscience of Cracking an Egg

There's a well-known story in the food studies world involving the acceptance, and eventual dominance, of pre-made cake mixes. In the 1950s,...

The Future of Sleep

...

The Danger of Measuring Emotions

An easy way to identify a future dilemma is to spot two polar, but entirely sensible, reactions to an emerging practice or...

Play to be healthy, one month at a time

Can playing a game online help you be healthier? Buster Benson thinks so.

Keep on breathing ... Notes from TEDMED 2010 (part 1)

TEDMED 2010 kicked off last Tuesday night with a performance by opera singer Charity Tilleman-Dick.  At first I thought, "Well, she has a lovely...

Job Preparedness in Uncertain Economic Times

How do you prepare for a job of the future? What kinds of skills will you need to have twenty or thirty years from now, what kind of worker will you...

FutureCast: Michael Chorost on World Wide Mind (Nov 4, 11am PT)

Join Lyn Jeffery in conversation with Michael Chorost, discussing—among other things—his second book, World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of...

The Salmon Pairs Well with Miles Davis

An interesting study sponsored by Unilever took a look at how background music and sound alter the perception of taste. Among other things, that...

What do you think might help accelerate change in health and health care?

[img_assist|nid=3629|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=425|height=425]

The Evolutionary Psychology of Happiness

In contrast to the popular lore about achieving happiness by changing your thoughts, there's a new theory in town....

Measuring How Well We Work Together

During the recent Breakthroughs to Cures game, which we ran in collaboration with the Myelin Repair Foundation, one of the key themes that emerged was...

A new model: Crowd Self-Experiments

There's a new twist happening in the Quantified Self space. What was previously only individuals reporting on their data gathering and occasional...

Geoengineering at the National Academy of Sciences

It's amazing what can happen in five years.

Do You Eat Soft-Serve Chicken?

Yes, I hate to say it, but this is your chicken. If you've ever eaten hot dogs, chicken nuggets, or anything else made of mechanically separated meat,...

FutureCast: Dean Eckles on Mobile Persuasion (Oct 14, 12pm PT)

Join Lyn Jeffery in conversation with Dean Eckles, discussing how we interact socially through communication technologies as well as the “social”...

On Anticipatory Quarantines

A leading researcher at Microsoft last week suggested that computers that have been infected with viruses should be, in effect, quarantined from...

You're Not Popular Enough for the Flu Shot

I'm a little late to this great study by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler about the possibilities of using social network analysis to predict flu...

Freezing Ourselves: Medicine of the Future?

When I was nine, I used to wonder whether it would be more painful to freeze to death or burn to death. I vividly imagined both scenarios, and decided...