Nearly every communication method we invent eventually conveys unwanted commercial messages.

Fluid intelligence doesn't look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower.

Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio.

Technologists and futurists call the mashup of digital info and physical space 'blended reality.'

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

Computer programmers, biotechnologists, environmental scientists, neuroscientists, nanotech engineers - all of these fields, and more, should have at least a course in ethics as part of their degree requirements.

Preventing global warming from becoming a planetary catastrophe may take something even more drastic than renewable energy, superefficient urban design, and global carbon taxes.