August was the biggest month ever for U.S. gasoline consumption. Americans used a staggering 9.7 million barrels per day. That’s more than a gallon per day for every U.S. man, woman and child.

The new peak comes as a surprise to many. In 2012, energy...

Machine learning is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Every time we talk to our smartphones, search for images or ask for restaurant recommendations, we are interacting with machine learning algorithms. They take as input large amounts of raw...

Recent news articles have highlighted positive findings in experimental Zika virus pre-clinical vaccine studies in monkeys and described the start of two Zika virus vaccine trialsin humans.

These stories have spurred hopes that a Zika virus vaccine...

Donald Trump’s admiration for Russian President Vladamir Putin puts the U.S. perilously close to abandoning its longstanding role as democracy’s greatest proponent. In the process, Trump is challenging the already threatened notion that democracy is the only legitimate system of rule.

When he and Hillary Clinton take the stage, in what...

In the same way that actual grit accumulates in the cracks and crevices of the landscape, our cultural insistence on possessing grit has gradually come to the forefront of child-rearing and education reform.

In 2012, Paul...

On Sept. 26, 2016, the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) are expected to sign a formal agreement to end 50 years of conflict.

More than eight million Colombians have been displaced from...

Police killings of African-Americans on social media have become the visual hallmark of our time. This decade will be recalled through blurry cellphone and dash-cam videos of shootings....

Public speaking is an anxiety-inducing task for most us, yet it’s also a necessary one, whether you’re a corporate CEO, a high school teacher or a presidential candidate. And like the rest of us, candidates stumble when speaking in public.

Donald Trump’s tendency to speak off the cuff, for example, has long rattled his campaign...

Every presidential election year in my American Political Campaigns and Elections course, I get an opportunity to spend a full lecture discussing with students some of the famous moments from historic presidential debates.

I explain to students that while the presidential candidate debates are supposed to be about presenting policy alternatives to...

A new documentary, “Starving the Beast,” recently examined the state of public higher education. Directed by Austin-based award-winning documentarian Steve Mims, the film argues that a network of right-wing think tanks and educational reformers are...