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Theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt did not expect to spend last summer travelling across spongy tundra to a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. But that is where he spent three weeks tracing the origins of the world’s only known natural example of a quasicrystal--an exotic type of structure discovered in 1982 in a synthetic material by Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding.

The most successful owners, like the best athletes, know there's no reaching the top. There's only working harder and learning faster than the next guy. “Practice makes perfect” is not true

When you sell to people you truly can't stand, you make yourself less effective and hurt your sales growth. For the past week—the first I’ve had off since February 2007—I’ve been trying to decide how to best start out the new year

I know you're passionate about changing the world, but if your business model sucks and you go out of business, it helps nobody. Here's how to make the smartest moves.

The results are in--and they arent pretty.

Israel may be the world's next energy superpower . But is this good for the Jews

NASA has posted a series of satellite photos documenting the expansion of the Athabasca tar sands. The Athabasca pits cover over 54,000 square miles in Alberta with an estimated reserve of 1.75 trillion barrels of oil – good enough for third in the world behind Saudi Arabia (1) and Venezuela (2).

Next year's economy will be hostage to the scary Euro crisis and towering debts at home.

A Stanford Business School professor concedes that biz schools often kill the passion and creativity of students. So should you avoid higher ed? Business schools get a lot of flak, mostly for their exorbitant cost, but also due to a feeling among some in the world of entrepreneurship that the experience is simply a waste of time.

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day. Christmas Is For Online Shopping Too

In this extended version of the talk from our latest issue , we speak with Jim Rekoske, VP for renewable energy and chemicals for Honeywell--which licenses its biofuel technology to refineries.

In the 19th century, artists including Degas, Monet, and Renoir got together periodically to discuss their commissions, their patrons, and their industry. This circle met consistently, and the artists credited these small gatherings with not only making their careers but the rise of the impressionist movement.

If you worry too much about being accepted, you won't be following your passion--and making a real difference.

There’s a scene in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird — one of my all-time favorite novels — where the little girl-narrator, Scout, sees pretty white snow flakes falling and assumes the world is ending. She’s never seen snow before, since it’s a very rare occurrence in rural Alabama. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not ending now, but it’s just one more bit of evidence that weather is a very wacky thing.

When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.