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What’s the all-time best career advice I've ever received? Don’t reinvent the wheel. As much as we all want to be unique, innovation doesn't necessarily mean coming up with an idea from scratch. It means taking ideas and creations that are out there and combining them or building on them to create something even better. Once I'd cemented that idea...

How do you get people to like you? This seems like an elusive question that has likely perplexed mankind for millennia. After all, there’s a common human tendency to want to be liked. Scientists have drawn on a body of research to answer this question and what they found might surprise you... ask people questions! This discovery plays on human...

What is open source? The term "open source" refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. The term is most commonly used in programming in which the original source code is made freely available so that other users can modify and build on the initial product. The genius of open source is that no...

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, before going on to be one of the world’s most famous players. Henry Ford declared bankruptcy twice before finally getting Ford Motors off the ground. Walt Disney was fired from an early job for "not being creative enough” and his first studio went bankrupt before he hit on success with...

“The first team to finish will get extra recess time on Friday.” “Any student who gets less than a 70% on tomorrow’s quiz will have to attend tutoring after school.” There are a number of ways teachers motivate students to do what we want them to do. From grades, to rewards, and even punishments, we use these tools to motivate...

Almost all of us can sympathize with the crushing sensation of getting a failing grade at one point or another. Whether it's on a spelling quiz in elementary school or an essay for a college class, the sight of an “F” at the top of your paper can be equally demoralizing. What sets people apart, however, comes from how one...

What happens with most of the work that students do in school? From my experience, most of it ended up crumpled at the bottom of my book bag. What relevance it had with the assignment last week, the subject as a whole, or my personal life was pretty much lost on me. Homework was homework, and if I wanted to...

Today, many people who’ve grown accustomed to rideshare apps, such as Uber, can’t imagine going back to the days of riding in taxis. In hindsight, taxis seem incredibly inconvenient to many. You have to stand on a street corner to find one, drivers prefer you to pay in cash, and you have no way of knowing if they are trustworthy before...

Colin Carlson graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in ecology and environmental biology when he was 15. At age 16 he had earned his Master’s degree in the same subjects, and by 22 he completed his Ph.D. from the University California, Berkeley. He wants to use his degrees to study parasites and the impact that climate change...

We all have that one colleague that writes emails the same way they speak. If they've had a bad day, you can read it loud and clear in their latest email. It's even worse when it comes to the really important emails. Like that time when they submitted a request to the school's administrator on behalf of your department. It...