Every year thousands of the best and brightest students leave to study at universities in Europe and America.

BBC: What if Africa were to become the hub for global science?

When Lang was fifteen, he left China and his mother and, with his father, went to America to study at the Curtis Institute.

NEWYORKER: The Olympian

In a recent study economists at the OECD found that America does indeed do well on some measures, such as breast-cancer survival rates and cervical-cancer screening, compared with other rich countries.

ECONOMIST: Reforming American health care

The Temple study, presented at the Gerontological Society of America's annual meeting, found 25% of their subjects had "clinically relevant" levels of symptoms, yet only 8% reported having a current diagnosis of depression.

BBC: Centenarians 'depression prone'

While there hasn't been a formal study of Smartphoniacs in America (although there is one underway at the University of Florida), we know that between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008, the North American smart-phone market grew 78.7%.

WSJ: Addicts of the Information Age

"This is almost the same improvement, it's just not significant because the study was small, " says Michael King , a biotech analyst at Bank of America Securities .

FORBES: Magazine Article

Alan Goldhammer, vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the industry will study the suggestions and weigh whether to incorporate them.

CNN: Growth of clinical trial outsourcing raises issues

According to a study coauthored by Josh Makower, a professor of Medicine at Stanford University, patients in America must wait two full years longer, on average, than those in Europe for medical devices to hit the market.

FORBES: It's Time To Blow Up The FDA's Drug Review Process

One retired General, Jim Dubik, who helped mastermind the surge in Iraq and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, told me that for eight years America adopted the wrong strategy, counter-terrorism, which allowed the Taliban to grow.

BBC: Secretary of Defence Robert Gates's last battle