In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize [...]

Architect Thom Mayne has never been one to take the easy option, and this whistle-stop tour of the buildings he’s created makes you glad for it. These are big ideas cast in material form [...]

Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. M.I.T. engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.

Mark Vanderbeeken writes for Core77 that the landscape for innovation in Brazil is changing fast: A new report by the UK think tank Demos argues that Brazil is a ‘natural knowledge-economy’ where the intertwining of knowledge, skills and innovation with environmental and other natural assets holds the key to competitive advantage [...]

Stimulated by governments’ supporting policies, a large number of Chinese firms have turned to new energy and related industries. Over 10 large scale new energy bases have been established. However, experts say that China’s emerging new energy sector may face a lack of core technology crisis [...]

The emissions cut target proposed by developed countries is “unfair” to developing countries, a Chinese expert said recently: Pan Jiahua, executive director of the research centre for sustainable development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, made the statement in an interview with Xinhua at the Global Economic Symposium (GES 2009) held in Ploen Castle, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany [...]

Some 300 million Chinese now living in rural areas — the equivalent of the entire population of the United States — will move into cities in the coming 15 to 20 years, said a senior Chinese official recently [...]

Autodesk ranked 55th out of America’s 500 largest corporations on its environmental performance, policies, and reputation [...]

How can a struggling country break out of poverty if it’s trapped in a system of bad rules? Economist Paul Romer unveils a bold idea: “charter cities,” city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations [...]

Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time” [...]