For several months, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank and former vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International, had promised the financial community he would do “whatever it takes” to boost the European Union’s sagging economy.  On January 22 he exceeded market expectations with a $1.3 trillion quantitative easing program that has the ECB purchasing 60 billion...

The evidence is in: Your cellphone is slowly killing you. More than two dozen studies over more than a dozen years have linked cellphone use not only to cancers in, on and near your head, but also to other ills ranging from weakened memory to birth defects. Three new 2014 reports are just the latest. In one, University of Bordeaux...

Car ownership among the under-30 demographic is down and fewer 18-year-olds are obtaining driver licenses – trends that have framed the millennial generation as being uninterested in driving. Obvious factors – the traditionally high cost of fuel, soaring insurance costs, high student-loan debt and poor job prospects for the young – have played a role, but some analysts believe the...

Occupy Peace is an initiative The Trends Research Institute announced last fall to replace the talk of war with the talk of peace,  to replace the action of war with the action of peace. In a few short months, we kick off this bold campaign. We have changed the date from May 2 to Sunday, September 20, the day before...

I’m no crook. Read my lips, no new taxes. I never had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan. Republican or Democrat, name the president, pick the lie. The list goes on. They lie their way into office to get...

The Trends Research Institute’s third conference of 2014, held December 6, reinforced a strengthening trend line: Our participants play an essential role in advancing our analyses and deepening an understanding of the trends we address. The institute’s Top Trends for 2015 Forecast was unveiled for the first time before a live audience and recorded for worldwide viewing at our December...

Tomorrow’s hydrogen energy economy has come a large step closer.  A Manchester University research team, led by Nobel physicist Andrei Geim, has demonstrated a process that pulls hydrogen fuel out of thin air. The secret:  graphene, a one-atom-thick lattice of carbon atoms.  Graphene is thought to be the world’s best barrier, having proven impenetrable by every kind of liquid and...

American values have come under intense scrutiny after the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “Torture Report,” – officially titled the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. The raw details of who did what to whom subsequent to the 9/11 attacks have led to a great deal of public soul-searching as well as...

One disturbing undercurrent of our tracking of the Cops Gone Wild trend – the militarization of police departments and its impact on routine policing – has been the absence of reliable and compatible databases that track the true number of police violence cases, particularly homicides. Now a handful of concerned individuals have made it their business to maintain an accurate...