Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

A smartphone links patients' bodies and doctors' computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual's internal organs in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

Scientists have established huge numbers of links between particular diseases and snippets of DNA, but in the great majority of cases, this has not yet been translated into treatments that can help cure patients. These treatments will come - tomorrow, or the day after.

Historically, large-scale global trade has served two functions: 1) the exchange of goods between willing sellers and buyers described in Econ 101 textbooks; 2) as a tool of state aggrandizement, in which the private parties are stand-ins for governmental interests.