Po Bronson

Envisioning the far-out future of medicine is easy. The hard part is seeing the path between today and that future. Many promising trends in medicine fizzle out simply because healthcare mainstays like Big Pharma, Medicaid, the FDA and insurance companies carry too much inertia. Innovation can only enter the picture from the edges.

We set out to discover the future of sports, on the field and off. Barely had we begun when we noticed that the future seemed to be arriving way ahead of schedule. Scenarios we imagined could happen five to 10 years out instead were happening all around us.

Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Scientists think bouts of panic in stressful situations can be traced to genetics. But don’t freak out. Biology is not necessarily destiny....

The true story of people who answered the ultimate question.

Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents.

THE ASTONISHING STORY OF A DOCTOR WHO SUBJECTED FAITH TO THE RIGORS OF SCIENCE – AND THEN BECAME A TEST SUBJECT HERSELF. The odds-defying, eye-popping life and work of Elisabeth Targ, MD.

For decades, it was assumed that children see race only when society points it out to them. However, child-development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue—but we tell kids that "pink" means for girls and "blue" is for boys. "White" and "black" are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own.

Sleep is a biological imperative for every species on Earth. But humans alone try to resist its pull. Instead, we see sleep not as a physical need but a statement of character. It’s considered a sign of weakness to admit fatigue, and it’s a sign of strength to refuse to succumb to slumber. Sleep is for wusses. But perhaps we are blind to the toll it is taking on us.

Every generation before this one has had to make a choice in life between pursuing a steady career and pursuing wild adventures. In Silicon Valley, that trade-off has been recircuited. Injecting mind-boggling amounts of risk into the once stodgy domain of gray-suited business, young people no longer have to choose. They've turned life into a two-for-one deal: the career path as roller-coaster adventure.

Venture capitalists' favorite unit of measurement is the factor X. They live life on multiplication scale, and anything less than X is inconsequential. When they invest, they ignore 12 percent or 15 percent or 18 percent returns. They start to take notice when they see potential for 10X returns. In this lingo, Jurvetson blasted through college at nearly 2X the normal rate, and made partner at 6X speed.

Danny Hillis would have us execute a sort of backflip-with-twist on the way we have learned to think about the environment – which is to recognize that our negligible year-to-year impact on nature adds up to devastating consequences over generations of time. The backflip is to stop carping about the negative, and to imagine what we might accomplish over generations with minor year-on-year effort. The twist is to apply this type of thinking-beyond-nature to the rest of our lives.