British soccer--or football, whatever you call it--hasn't won Olympic gold in a century. To turn the team around, head coach Stuart Pearce has stuck to four guiding leadership principles that any business would do well to emulate.

Whirling lumps of cold space rock could one day help power our economy. Really. That's where the newly formed Planetary Resources comes in.

The toxic gold mining business may get a little bit cleaner with the Fairtrade and Fairmined standard, but how clean can mining ever be?

As the news hit markets around the world, the prices for oil and gold tilted.

"Gold has lost its prestige," says Rico Franses, an art history professor at the American University of Beirut. That's an interesting opinion when gold is at record-breaking prices -- it jumped 28% in 2010 to $1,400 an ounce -- but Franses, keynote speaker at this Boston art symposium, insists that our modern dollar fixation has actually devalued the precious metal. "When gold was the only store of value, it was sacred. In medieval art, gold was everywhere. Viewed by candlelight, it created a dazzling, spiritual effect," he says. "Today's world doesn't want to be dazzled by gold. Read More »

A list of events and conferences you don't want to miss this month.

While the global market for ever more sophisticated tech gadgets grows, the metals and minerals that make them go are controlled by a handful of countries.

Space junk is a growing problem, and it's getting worse every single minute, with no consensus on how best to clean it up. Now there's at least a solution that's beautiful: The GOLD balloon.

A couple of employees of ad agency W+K have come up with one of the kookier ideas in recent memory: data-driven jewelry. After scores of meetings, planner Lisa Prince noticed that data was being packaged up in ever increasingly-beautiful ways. So she teamed up with fellow W+K employee, art director Nicholla Long, to create Plot jewelry, described as "a brand that takes interesting data and transforms it into wearable art."

The winning designs for Vancouver's 2010 Olympic medals have been revealed: the gold, silver, and bronze medals will all be made from melted-down electronics.