Though occasionally the Scientific American pile got upturned by an eleven-year-old searching for science-project material, as far as I could tell the National Geographic pile was never disturbed by its owners, and was there merely to ascend, ever higher.

NEWYORKER: Yellow Fever

Instead, it's compatible with "Mobipocket" books, a digital format that offers more than 100, 000 titles, though many are noncopyrighted classics, romance novels and science fiction--hardly the material recommended by Oprah's book club.

FORBES: Magazine Article

This required a cross-discipline education including nursing, psychology, material science and whatever else was required to help machines learn about the real world.

WSJ: The Weekend Interview With Sebastian Thrun: What's Next for Silicon Valley?

The state of the ocean today should be the tipping point that wakes us up from the trance of consumption that we haven lulled into complacency with, and which sends us into a new era of material science, bio and ocean degradability, and new re-use technologies.

CNN: Re-use tech can help our oceans recover

Science, which appeals to both children and adults, seems to be good theme-park material.

ECONOMIST: Lottery projects

Even more fundamentally, the digital economy's infrastructure has advanced basic material science and classes of machine tools that have led directly to the new high-power electronics (enabling hybrids) and to big, cheap flat-panel, thin-film PVs (derived from the massive thin-film machines that make flat-panel-TVs).

FORBES: Bubble Energy?