“But, why?” These may not have been the very first words I uttered as a child but, much to my parents’ chagrin, these were certainly my two favorite words to say, repeatedly, incessantly. To this day, they remain a daily inquiry. Not to say it’s a bad thing, I owe these two little words a →

Green is the new black, or so they say in the fashion industry. But I’m not convinced that green can ever be regarded as earnestly as black. Black is classic, all-purpose and safe. Black is flattering and tasteful. Green is unseasoned and simple. It is natural and commonplace. But there is nothing natural about the →

After sitting and observing in my local park for several minutes, I was taken aback by the incredible number of edges that I noticed: cloud-shaped boundaries between plants, pockets of light and dark where snow gave way to dark soil beneath, trails of use and lack thereof. The more I considered these edges the more →

If you have a new idea for a business, conventional wisdom says that you need to write a 3- to 5-year business plan and then execute that plan. You want a business loan? Write a business plan. Want a grant? Write a business plan. It’s easy, of course – there are hundreds of websites and →

“You have at least a million relatives as close as tenth cousin, and no one on Earth is any farther removed than your 50th cousin. With each breath, you take into your body 10 sextillion atoms, and–owing to the wind’s ceaseless circulation–over a year’s time you have intimate relations with oxygen molecules exhaled by every →

It’s that time of year again; time for the second annual Tommies, my 2010 kudos to the most impressive of recent bio-inspired designs or discoveries. As always, I will arrange the awards by the creatures that inspired the innovations, and invite any of the discoverers to have an Irish coffee with me at the Buena →