Most of us who work as professional futurists never really stop gathering information - you never know when a provocative, potentially disruptive new development might appear.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

Neodymium is one of 17 'rare-earth metals,' and these elements have turned out to be critical to the rapidly-growing green technology industries.

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.

Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.

It's an exciting time in the world - democracy, in all its different shapes, is rolling around to new countries all the time. To have a chance to shape the democracy in my home country is an honor.

I realize the voters elected President Obama in 2012, but they also, in 2014, elected enough Republican senators to gain a majority in the Senate, so we control the confirmation process. And these are two supposedly coequal branches of government involved in this filling of a Supreme Court vacancy.

There is a lot of waste in government-run programs generally, and a lot of waste and fraud and misuse of money in Medicare and Medicaid that can be saved.