What is creativity?

Well, according to one definition: it’s imagining new ideas by learning how to envision that which cannot be immediately seen.

So that implies that creativity can be taught. 

News broke last week that two research giants are considering teaming up to fight cancer together.  Or at least to fight for grants together.

The University of Rochester Medical Center's Wilmot Cancer Center and Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo are both major grant recipients of federal research dollars, but that pool of cash isn't as deep as it used to be.  A partnership could make their funding applications even more compelling.  But when two giant institutions team up there's potential for a culture clash.  

It's rare for a wind turbine to collapse, bringing down enormous steel blades and tons of machinery. But that's what happened last December at the Fenner wind farm, located in the rolling hills between Syracuse and Utica.

What caused the turbine to collapse is unknown. 

Massachusetts has been home to debates about off-shore wind power for years, courtsey of the Cape Wind project.  Now it's also seeing NIMBY drama unfold ON shore, according to a piece this morning in the Boston Globe.  Governor Deval Patrick wants to the state to draw heavily from wind power by 2020, and is advocating for legislation that would streamline the permitting process.

Check out this story about student entrepreneurs in Syracuse, who competed against each other in a start-up competition.  Highlights include student brewers, a greasy soap maker, and Caribbean hot sauce. Delicious!

We're the Innovation Trail, a collaboration between five public media outlets in upstate New York.

We're looking at New York's "innovation economy" and reporting about the connections between investment and education, politics and people, technology and geography, as the state attempts to pull its economy up by its bootstraps.

Enjoying Syracuse history doesn't have to come from stuffy museums or books. A couple new ventures show that history can be found in a glass or at a local eatery.

"SyracuseDiners.com" is a multimedia guide to diners in Syracuse. It's interactive, displays menus, and informs readers about diner culture.

We're gearing up to do some reporting about the macro and microeconomic effects of gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale. However, our colleagues at NPR and member stations in shale regions have already been doing fantastic reporting about hydraulic fracturing, so we thought we'd share some of their work.

Yesterday our Binghamton division made a trip to East Meredith, population 1,100. A lot of it looks like what you see above. It’s not the big city.

Talking with town Supervisor Keitha Capouya about major employers, she said that a lot of people worked in agriculture, some people worked in larger, nearby Oneonta, and more and more people were working from their homes.

Capouya herself performs a lot of her administrative duties from her own very rural home (she’s had a bear on her front porch gnawing on her birdfeeder).

While researching the waning years of Orson Welles's career I came upon a documentary he narrated in 1972 called "Future Shock." 

The film is based on a popular late 1960s book by Alvin Toffler, who claims the title "futurist." How does one earn such a distinction? Sign me up! 

Essentially, future shock is a condition resulting from too much change in too short of time. It's the lack of permanence. It's a tail wind of transience that (the theory is...) undermines how we orient ourselves in the world.