'Slow City' Gets Way Too Hectic

When McDonald's began to open in Italian cities, the Slow Food movement started promoting traditional Italian meals that lasted for hours. Slow Food ...

The President Can Text Everyone in the U.S.

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The ...

World's Quietest Spot Will Drive You Nuts

Everybody seems to be looking for a little peace and quiet these days. But even such a reasonable idea can go too far. The quietest place on earth, an ...

'Generation deaf': Hearing Loss Among Millennials

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they ...

Builders Use 'Piles' In Manhattan Skyscrapers

The island of Manhattan consists almost entirely of bare granite, a very hard and strong type of rock. To carry the weight of a 75- or 100-story skyscraper, ...

Statistics on Our Drop in Attention Span

According to the research of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just ...

Study of How Long We'll Wait

When Timex (the watch company) asked people how long they would wait before taking action in a wide variety of situations, researchers discovered that ...

You Have a Shorter Attention Span than a Goldfish

A study by Microsoft of 2,000 consumers discovered some interesting things. The first is that the average human attention span has gone down. In 2000 ...

The Need to Fill Our Bicycle Tires (Souls)

Editor's Note: Tell this illustration as a story or as a prop illustration by using an actual bicycle or a bike tire.

On a recent bike trip it wasn't ...

Pictures on Smartphones Can't Replace Real Life

For more than five hundred years the city of Florence has marked Easter with a wild ceremony called (in English) "the explosion of the cart." ...