Institute For The Future

Preparing Students to Navigate Genetic Risks

A new training program at Beth Israel Deaconness aims to teach medical students about genetics through fairly nontraditional means: Ask medical...

Self-Tracking for Activity... and Investing?

Consumer electronics company Phillips has recently released a couple new products that integrate self-tracking and biofeedback into the design in...

Would you like a lemon wedge or some nutritional advice to go with your Coke? Or a penny per ounce sales tax?

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Innovation and mental health

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Using Food to Change Your Mood

Too wired to go to sleep after downing an energy drink? There's a solution for that--anti-energy drinks--and they represent a fascinating, and...

Municipal Vaporware: Why NYC's Data Mine is A Data Dump

This morning, Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled New York City's long-awaited Big Apps contest. Big Apps seeks to promote the Internet industry in the Big...

Explore the Future of your Business at the Future Space Conference on Nov 16 in Vienna, Austria

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The astonishingly deep effect of primary metaphors in our lives

In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors...

Measuring the brain's response to good advertising

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Memory--Now in Handy Nasal Spray Form

A group of German researchers have developed a nasal spray that appears to improve memory. The spray, derived from a chemical from the body's immune...

Crowdsourcing health research

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"Stories of Health" makes health debate personal

Stories of Health is making the country's current debate around healthcare reform personal. The website features dozens of video interviews with...

What You Know Can Kill You

"Smoking can kill you"--it's an old message, but appears as one of several new blunt warning labels on packs of cigarettes along with other much more...

Apologizing Means Never Having to Spend any Money

Would you rather have an apology by itself or an apology and a bit of cash? If you're like most people, you want the apology, without the money, at...

Nudging employees to wellness is a hot topic

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A shameless plug

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More on the financial rewards of health and wellness

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Take the Blue Pill... Unless You Love Italian Soccer

A Wired Magazine piece on placebos has gained a fair amount of attention for tracing the inexplicable increase in the size of the placebo effect in...

Getting Paid to Lose Weight

Would you lose weight for $1,000? HealthyWage, a company that announced its public launch this week, believes that the promise of a financial...

Engineering Meat

I'm sure I'm not the first researcher to spend a day reading about the high costs--in terms of land, fuel, and water--involved with producing meat...

Nutrients—here, there, everywhere—and for sale

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The scent of . . . an illness

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Does Depression Serve a Purpose?

Depression, the mental health variety, doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Lots of people are...