We are living through years of great importance, marked by the unstoppable evolution of technology, science and the information society. This book brings together twenty-two essays written by prestigious researchers from the world's leading universities on areas as diverse as crucial to our future: climate change, artificial intelligence, economics, cyber-security and geopolitics, democracy, anthropology, new media, astrophysics and cosmology, nanotechnology, biomedicine, globalisation, gender theory and the cities of the future.

Text by Michelle Baddeley, Virginia Burkett, Manuel Castells, Nancy Chau, Barry Eichengreen, Amos N. Guiora, Ravi Kanbur, Ramón López de Mántaras, Maria Martinon-Torres, José M. Mato, Diana Owen, Alex Pentland, Carlo Ratti, Martin Rees, Victoria Robinson, Daniela Rus, José Manuel Sánchez-Ron, Vivien A. Schmidt, Samuel H. Sternberg, Sandip Tiwari, Ernesto Zedillo, Yang Xu.