Dr Layla McCay

If you had $75 billion and wanted to do something really useful with it, what should you spend it on? This is the question that has occupied the minds of 65 researchers and a panel of some of the world's top economists (including four Nobel Laureates) for the last 18...

Do we have the right to be forgotten? This rather intriguing question was posed last night by Jeff Rosen, at an Internet privacy event at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. I was particularly interested because having used the Internet since 1995-ish, I have contributed all sorts of...

Last week I found my usually-diverse Twitter feed had coalesced into a single hashtag, the trolley buses chugging through the streets of Washington, D.C. were sporting bold logos on their sides, and all around the city people were wearing giant nametags bearing their name, face, and three things they liked...

I had never heard of the term "professional soulmate." But it turns out that while I was spending my formative years coming up with brilliant ideas to change the world, I should actually have been screening my fellow students for their potential as my future business partners.

That's what...

Female hammerhead sharks in captivity can reproduce without the services of a gentleman shark, which is how they came to play a starring role at an intriguingly diverse conference I attended on "resilience" last week at the New America Foundation. The argument was that sharks do...

Apparently it takes three liters of water to produce one liter of sparkling water. So said Alex Prud'homme, author of The Ripple Effect, at a World Water Day event I attended this week. In fact it was the third of four water events I attended. And...

My father had a cellphone before most people had even heard of them. I remember his proud face that day in 1991, when he came home brandishing what appeared to be a sturdy, oversized briefcase, and announced that we were now a mobile phone-owning household.

I remember the thrill...

I spent a cheery hour or two last week enjoying PAHO's celebration of programs throughout the Americas designed to empower women and improve their health. I was particularly taken with their tactic of gently handing speakers a rose when they went over their allocated time. But I could...

About 10 years ago I went to Osaka to investigate why people with kidney failure in Japan seemed to have better survival five years after starting dialysis treatment compared with people in Britain. Dialysis aims to replicate kidney functions to keep people alive. So you might think that comparing the...

Could holding annual Rare Disease Day on the 29th of February possibly be a wry statement on just how rare these diseases are? Other diseases might decadently have their annual day every year, but rare diseases are so very rare that even their annual day is occasional? The...

In the glow of a hundred screens, a hundred fingers tap. The audience glances upwards only intermittently, mainly to check their tweets scrolling on the big screen behind the panel of speakers. So proceeds a typical event at Social Media Week, where a smartphone is the accessory du...

On holiday in South Korea last month, I found myself 'nudged' into swapping my G&T for a cup of tea.

It was not that downtown Seoul lacked establishments happy to indulge my holiday Hendricks habit. Rather, bars were a hassle to find and not especially nice, while coffeeshops were...