Rick Docksai's blog

In the days of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, people lived in fear of a hypothetical nuclear world war that would obliterate human civilization. Today, civilization’s end is no longer hypothetical: It’s a certainty unless we restructure how we as a species live, work, play, and even think.

Russian spacecraft fleets have been busy the last few months: With the U.S.

Russia underwent several governmental upheavals in the last hundred years—from tsarism to communism, then on to capitalism—and the massive demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities this past weekend against election fraud have some int

Almost any teacher will agree that technology is changing how students learn, but is it changing how student think?

Will North Korea collapse? Many people in the democratic world hope for no less. For them, however, South Korea-based scholar Andrei Lankov has some advice: Don’t count on it.

The Chinese government has been exceptionally shrewd at monitoring and restricting its citizens’ Internet use, so far. But Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales insisted in a presentation last week that China’s government can’t keep the information out forever.

How future-ready is your city? Take a look at innovation firm 2thinknow’s annual Innovation Cities Index, which ranks metropolises across the globe on their innovativeness. The results of this year's index may surprise you—or dismay you, as the case may be.

In the twentieth century, the United States won the race to the Moon. In this century, though, don’t be surprised if Russia is the first to land a human on Mars. Roscosmos (Russia’s official space agency) is not only making bold promises about sending human explorers to Earth’s red neighbor; it’s making concrete progress in the here and now toward delivering on them.

Vladimir Putin’s September 24 announcement of a comeback bid for the Russian presidency next year dismayed advocates of democracy within U.S. and European

Your great-grandmother may have known a lot more about sustainable living than you do. That’s the thesis of What’s Gotten Into Us? (Random House, 2011). Author McKay Jenkins (http://mckayjenkins.com), a University of Delaware English and journalism professor, takes aim at the tens of thousands of industrial chemicals that manufacturers have been adding to household amenities over the past 70 years. If we want to protect our health and the planet’s health, he says, we will do away with these substances and learn to live much like people did at the beginning of the twentieth century.