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.

We fear hackers lifting our digital wallet, a public accounting of our private lives, and we wonder if the shoes that follow us around the Internet will someday, with the click of a distant mouse, look like the jackboots of old.

When I started on YouTube, no one talked about getting famous on the Internet or getting discovered on YouTube. I didn't even know it was a possibility.

We have the resources and technology to produce more energy than we consume and break our long-standing dependence on foreign sources of oil. All we need is the will. In fact, there's a path to follow, one that North Dakota blazed over the last decade by building a comprehensive energy plan we called Empower North Dakota.

I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.