They sound like something out of science fiction, but Bitcoins are getting just a little bit more real every day. They’re intangible and invisible, but bitcoins recently attracted some real investment capital from the Winklevoss twins, who first dreamed up the idea for Facebook — or so their lawsuit argued.

The European banking sector may still be on shaky footing. But it’s not stopping European banks from putting together a good flashmob. Last year, the Spanish bank, Banco Sabadell, brought together 100 professional musicians and singers to perform the anthem of the European Union — Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9.

MOOCs — they’re getting a lot of hype, in part because they promise so much, and in part because you hear about students signing up for these courses in massive numbers. 60,000 signed up for Duke’s Introduction to Astronomy on Coursera. 28,500 registered for Introduction to Solid State Chemistry on edX.

Last spring, Ken Auletta wrote a profile of Stanford University in the pages of The New Yorker, which started with the question: “There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?” It’s perhaps an unavoidable question when you consider a startling fact cited by the article.

Nike footwear and celebrity athletes usually go hand-in-hand. When you think Nike, you think of Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson and Mia Hamm. And let’s not forget the now troubled duo of Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong too. Fit, lithe bodies generally sell sneakers, we know that.
But then there’s the bizarre, odd exception.

“When [Jack] Kerouac died in 1968 at the age of 47, he was a broken alcoholic, his literary reputation so depleted he was unable even to find a paperback publisher for his last novel, Vanity of Duluoz,” writes The Telegraph. “Unsure of what value to put on his estate, the bank valued it at a nominal $1.

Many sci-fi tales go something like this: The human race travels into the great unknown, deep outer space, and encounters beings with forces greater than its own. Greater fire power. Greater intelligence. Greater technological ability. But, in Destination Earth, the standard narrative gets flipped on its head.

Long before iPhones, Garmins, and Google Maps conspired to make cartographic sheep of us all, Chevrolet had a vested interest in glamorizing anything to do with four wheels, including the process that put maps in a supposedly adventurous, car-buying public’s hands.

So much of what we experience as digital is intangible. The color and texture of the Internet exists only for the time we have that particular site loaded. With just a click of the mouse, the lushness disappears.
Except that it doesn’t, really.

In 2006, Louis Knickerbocker, a meat distributor from Newport Beach, California, bought a Picasso drawing online. The price looked too good to be true, $39,999.99. But why have concerns when the piece was being sold by the reputable art dealer, Costco.