Americans are turning back to old-fashioned tinkering and hands-on innovation. We’ll ask what a new burst of grassroots engineering might mean for the U.S. economy.

Last week, host Tom Ashbrook was on stage with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, asking him about some of the biggest technology and business issues of our time.

Google, Apple and a whole tech universe are vying for the next great prize: mobile computing. We’ll ask how life changes with a smartphone in everyone’s pocket.

America’s super-hot electric car from Tesla Motors. We’ll talk with Tesla CEO, Elon Musk.

We talk with two top computer scientists about how “total recall” technology could change all our lives.

“The Beatles: Rock Band” is the video game event of the season. We’ll ask its creator how it changes the way we experience music.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple. The Internet wars are hot. We’ll ask what’s at stake as the battle shifts from desktops to the digital cloud.

No cars. No waste. No gas or oil. We go to Abu Dhabi, where plans are underway to build the world’s first carbon-neutral city.

Robots among us. iRobot CEO Colin Angle on the business and science of robotics now.

Facebook’s social network is 200 million strong and growing fast. But the culture and its expectations are changing. We’ll look at the Facebook evolution.

More newspapers bite the dust. Will a million bloggers save, maybe even improve, the news? Or not?

The world loves its iPods, iPhones, TiVo, OnStar, XBox and Blackberries. They all run off the Internet. But the Internet was built — and built out — in the age of the personal computer, when anyone could climb on and tinker from their keyboard.
That openness — almost anarchy — made the Net a wide-open realm [...]

Grand Theft Auto IV, out this week in its millions of red hot copies, is a vast sensation in the video gaming world. It’s a blockbuster — bigger than movies or music and way bigger than books.
It is – as usual – bloody, brutal, grim, dark, wild — a no-holds-barred video crime spree set in [...]

For a long time in life, Alzheimer’s seems like somebody else’s problem. An issue for the unfortunate old. A misty, separate continent of life.
And then, it can hit you. Your own parents, needing help. Losing their grip. Your own odds of following them into Alzheimer’s — higher than you’d ever wish.
One in 10 people get [...]

Last week, in the frozen north of Norway, the seeds began to pour into the Global Seed Vault — the “doomsday vault,” some have called it. Five hundred feet of a super-secure cave in an Arctic mountainside is filling now with millions of seeds from all over the world.
As climate change and genetic engineering put [...]

First there was Microsoft, and a colossus made from software for the personal computer. Then those PCs got tied together on the web, and there was Yahoo, a giant hub for e-mail and chat rooms and all the web brought.
Then there was Google, the uber search engine and high-minded master of the Internet universe, with [...]

As stock markets around Asia and the world headed south today, India’s finance minister tried to calm the selling: “Look,” he said, “India’s economy is headed for a booming 9 percent growth this year.” So he hopes.
And what will Indians spend that plenty on? India’s industrial giant Tata hopes they will soon be spending it [...]

If you hadn’t noticed, you’re not looking. We live in the era of pervasive cosmetic surgery. Everybody nipped and tucked and botoxed and lipo-sucked to a fare-the-well.
Look around at the “trout pout” lips and “wind tunnel” facelifts, the Kabuki zone of expressionless brows, the gravity-defying fronts and rears and rows of paint-white teeth — and [...]

Climate change is on the table this week at the world conference in Bali, Indonesia, and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.
But as the politicians haggle over much-needed climate policy, scientists and venture capitalists, students and inventors, are looking to give us an extreme energy makeover: pursuing breakthroughs in everything from biofuels to green buildings, [...]

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: scientists bring back to life ancient deadly viruses that once wiped out vast numbers of the human race for research purposes only, of course. And where do they go to find those extinct diseases? Deep within our own genome.
Long ago, some of the viruses that didn’t kill us got [...]