Science News

In a 1934 book titled, The Treaties on Documentation, Belgian entrepreneur Paul Otlet conceived of a system for requesting and retrieving massive amounts of information. Calling it a “radiated library,” Otlet’s device would allow users to retrieve all the world’s information—books, magazines, film, music—with a single phone call. Did he invent the Internet? Here, Alex Wright, director of user experience at The New York Times and discoverer of Otlet’s lost opus, explains at the 2012 World Science Festival program, Internet Everywhere, just how close Otlet had come to creating the world’s first information-networking system.

Students move out of the classroom and into the lab to turn ancient inventions they have been studying about into real-life working mechanisms.

There will always be a wild and unpredictable quality to creativity and invention, says Anthony McCaffrey, a cognitive psychology researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, because an "Aha moment" is rare and reaching it means overcoming formidable mental obstacles. But after studying common roadblocks to problem-solving, he has developed a toolkit for enhancing anyone's skills.