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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...

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...

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...

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...

A growing number of women in the US are choosing to give birth outside of hospital walls. The trend, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), saw twice as many women opting for midwife assisted home births or birthing center deliveries in 2012 as in 2004. Though the total number is still small-hovering...

In the summer edition of the Trends Journal, we reported:  “The obesity epidemic has prematurely aged at least a third of our population by decades.” As part of a larger package of stories examining why too many Americans seem to show little self respect, as evidenced in how they dress, interact with others and take...

Because they can, the majority of manufacturers of generic drugs have raised their wholesale prices over the last year – in some cases to soaring heights. Some common, long-term generics have gone from pennies to dollars per pill. Even for the insured, rising co-payments following in the wake of price increases of five hundred percent and more,...

It’s a Price War. And it’s being waged in a country near you. From commodity exchanges to retail sales, prices are plummeting – and the fight is on to sell products at whatever price the market will bear.                  While not all prices will deflate, the more cash-strapped consumers cut back on spending, the deeper the discounts...

Here’s what we see for community news coverage in 2015: “As print-driven journalism fades, robust coverage of communities and the issues that drive life in those areas suffers. General news coverage provided by dominant media outlets fades. And that encourages upstart media outlets to fill the coverage gaps…” The big chains – Gannett, News Corp.,...

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