For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples. In the western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual, sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in South Asia in… Read More »The coconut palm
Experts from Harvard Business School give advice to managers Most managers can identify the major trends of the day. But it the course of conducting research in a number of industries and working directly with companies, we have discovered that managers often fail to recognize… Read More »MAKING THE MOST OF TRENDS
The positive and negative effects of the chemical known as the ‘love hormone’ A Oxytocin is a chemical, a hormone produced in the pituitary gland in the brain. It was through various studies focusing on animals that scientists first became aware of the influence of… Read More »Oxytocin
Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent. It was known in biblical times, and is mentioned in several books of the Bible, both as an ingredient that was… Read More »Bringing cinnamon to Europe
Can computers really create works of art? The Painting Fool is one of a growing number of computer programs which, so their makers claim, possess creative talents. Classical music by an artificial composer has had audiences enraptured, and even tricked them into believing a human… Read More »Artificial artist?
This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought A We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to… Read More »Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too
New Zealand is a small country of four million inhabitants, a long-haul flight from all the major tourist-generating markets of the world. Tourism currently makes up 9% of the country’s gross domestic product, and is the country’s largest export sector. Unlike other export sectors, which… Read More »Case Study: Tourism New Zealand website
A After a number of serious failures of governance (that is, how they are managed at the highest level), companies in Britain, as well as elsewhere, should consider radical changes to their directors’ roles. It is clear that the role of a board director today… Read More »UK companies need more effective boards of directors
It’s time to start returning vanished native animals to Britain, says John Vesty There is a poem, written around 598 AD, which describes hunting a mystery animal called a llewyn. But what was it? Nothing seemed to fit, until 2006, when an animal bone, dating from around… Read More »Bring back the big cats
From our earliest origins, man has been making use of glass. Historians have discovered that a type of natural glass – obsidian – formed in places such as the mouth of a volcano as a result of the intense heat of an eruption melting sand… Read More »The History of Glass
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