Oracle recently lost its attempt to use patent and copyright law to force Google to pay US$9 billion for using parts of its Java computer language. Nine billion dollars isn’t chump change, not even for Google, but despite the verdict against Oracle, I’d say Google is not the only...

My reaction to the killing of Harambe the gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo when a child went into the gorilla’s enclosure is probably typical: I am sickened and I am angry. This must not happen again.

One step that some advocates will surely press for in light of Harambe’s killing is to change our legal system to designate gorillas and...

Just a couple months ago, some were declaring the old oil order dead after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) failed to agree on coordinated action at its April meeting in Doha.

That meeting was meant to bring about a production freeze to arrest the downward spiral of prices that began in July 2014. Instead, the Doha...

Since the 1980s biologists have used genetic engineering to express novel traits in crop plants. Over the last 20 years, these crops have been grown on more than one billion acres in the United States and globally. Despite their rapid adoption by...

As we use more and more data every year, where will we have room to store it all? Our rapidly increasing demand for web apps, file sharing and social networking, among other services, relies on information storage in the “cloud” – always-on Internet-connected remote servers that store, manage and process data. This in turn has...

Some 150 years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you would have to perform it yourself or be in the presence of musicians.

With Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877 came the ability to record music. At that point, the ways that people could...

A recent study by the National Institutes of Health found that more than one in three people in the United States have experienced pain of some sort in the previous three months. Of these, approximately 50 million suffer from chronic or severe pain.

To put these numbers in perspective, 21 million...

Pico Rivera is a dusty working-class Latino suburb of Los Angeles. After the school district, Wal-Mart is the city’s largest employer and the source of 10 percent of its tax revenue. More than 500 families in the town depend on income from the store.

The town is also the epicenter of activism by...

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.

Author and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote these words in 1949, and they are all the more important today.

As we enter the 21st century and today’s children look forward to living in the...

“Unbreakable," M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film, dwells on the theme of human fragility and the search for a human being impervious to injuries that would kill the rest of us. It turns out that this quest is not quite so fanciful as it might first seem. Scientists have identified a small...