Arne Duncan is leaving the US Department of Education in December. Reactions to his legacy have been mixed. Some see him as a heroic reformer, and others a well-intentioned but overreaching bureaucrat. He has been called the third...

When I was a newspaper science editor, I approached Nobel Prize season with mixed glee and anxiety. Glee, because I knew that, without even an argument, I would get space in the paper for stories about research too arcane to make it into print the other 51 weeks of the...

A hospital bombed in the midst of intense fighting. Patients and staff killed and wounded, the facility destroyed. An unspeakable tragedy – and unfortunately one seen before in recent and current conflicts.

The US airstrike that hit the Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz,...

A disciplinary board at Hinds Community College in Raymond, Mississippi, has ruled that a student arrested earlier this month for failing to show his student ID to campus police officers when asked to do so will not face punishment from the school.

Officers...

When the Supreme Court invalidated same-sex marriage bans in June, the Justices acknowledged they had the kids in mind.

In the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy cited the infringement of the interests of children being raised by same-sex couples as one reason for the Court’s ruling.

Who are these...

“I love deadlines,” English author Douglas Adams once wrote. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

We’ve all had the experience of wanting to get a project done but putting it off for later. Sometimes we wait because we just don’t care enough about the project,...

In July 2015, the Australian government announced a “war on feral cats,“ with the intention of killing over two million felines by 2020. The threat abatement plan to enforce this policy includes a mix of shooting, trapping and a reputedly “humane” poison.

S...

President Barack Obama, with fast-track negotiating powers in his back pocket, managed to seal the biggest trade agreement of the World Trade Organization era this month.

The passage of fast-track, agreed by Congress in June to allow a straight up-or-down vote on...

Neutrinos take patience. They’re worth it, and the announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes that, following related prizes in 1988 and 2002. Ironically, these near-undetectable particles can reveal things that cannot be seen any other way.

I could begin by telling you that...

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Project 523 – a covert operation launched by the Chinese government and headed by a young Chinese medical researcher by the name of Tu Youyou – discovered what has been the most powerful and...