With all that spam clogging your inbox, a more personalized experience with the brands you interact with would be a refreshing change of pace. Sharing insights from his research into what brands can do to improve the experience of the people they want to reach, personalization pioneer Mark Abraham highlights a key mindset that can help companies...

As founder of the Ig Nobel awards, Marc Abrahams explores the world's most improbable research. In this thought-provoking (and occasionally side-splitting) talk, he tells stories of truly weird science -- and makes the case that silliness is critical to boosting public interest in science.

In ten years, 40% of today's Fortune 500 companies on the S&P will be gone. Why? Mark Modesti argues it's because they fail to embrace trouble. A professional troublemaker and Customer Solutions Executive, Modesti uses examples from business, his personal life, and Abraham Lincoln to show why we need to embrace the trouble we ache to escape ...

Between 1927 and 1941, workers blasted 450,000 tons of rock from a mountainside using chisels, jackhammers, and dynamite. Gradually, they carved out Mount Rushmore. Today, the monument draws nearly 3 million people to South Dakota's Black Hills every year. But its façade belies a dark history. Ned Blackhawk and Jeffrey D. Means explore the destr...

4,300 years ago in ancient Sumer, the most powerful person in the city of Ur was banished to wander the vast desert. Her name was Enheduanna, and by the time of her exile, she had written forty-two hymns and three epic poems— and Sumer hadn't heard the last of her. Who was this woman, and why was she exiled? Soraya Field Fiorio details the life ...

If you're wondering why blackface -- mimicking people of African descent via stereotypes and makeup-darkened skin -- is a big deal, then perhaps a little history lesson can help demystify the outcry. Dwan Reece, curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, explains how this practice permeates the American psyche and cu...

Take a trip down the microworld as roboticists Paul McEuen and Marc Miskin explain how they design and mass-produce microrobots the size of a single cell, powered by atomically thin legs -- and show how these machines could one day be "piloted" to battle crop diseases or study your brain at the level of individual neurons.