"… he has persuaded me that we can solve many of our problems as long as we don't assume that we know more than we do." So concludes John Horgan in his insightful review of David Deutsch's new book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Will Transform the World. I not only agree with the…

Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss. You shouldn’t. Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a…

With all of the information now pulsing around us, it is easy to forget that "we don’t know what we don’t know." I constantly try to remind my clients in the health care sector of this simple fact. A case-in-point is the extraordinary strides being made in the field of genomics — which, due to…

In 2003, I wrote the book, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business.” In it, I outlined the many ways in which nanotechnology will impact the pharmaceutical industry in the near future. Recently, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have uncovered a method of reviving a…

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, has written an excellent article entitled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes Scientific Method Obsolete" in which he convincingly argues that massive amounts of data, in combination with sophisticated algorithms and super powerful computers, offers mankind a whole new way of understanding the world. Anderson believes that…

A few weeks back I had a posting  entitled "Change or Die … Unnecessarily” in which I provided a few examples of how our inability to unlearn could, quite literally, cost some people their lives. Well, the other day, one of my favorite thinkers, Josh Wolfe, sent me a copy his weekly newsletter, The Forbes/Wolfe…

WebMD has interesting article suggesting our behavior can influence how are genes act. According to research by Dean Ornish people can change how certain genes perform by making modest adjustments to their life style. Ornish found that by engaging in exercise and eating a more low-fat diet "more than 500 genes changed the way they…

IBM recently announced that it has developed a new supercomputer capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second. It is a little hard to wrap your brain around such mind-boggling numbers, but last year I wrote an article discussing an IBM supercomputer that was capable of performing 70 trillion calculations per second. In the piece,…

The Mayo Clinic is now operating a pilot project to offer "virtual consults" to patients living far away. The idea that a doctor must be physically present when conferring with a patient is going to be difficult for many doctors and health care providers to "unlearn," but the practice can save time, money and, ultimately,…