You can drive a nail with a hammer, and you can pull one. With a pencil you can write a poem or a song. Hammers and pencils are clearly useful – instrumentally valuable, that is. But if the pencil snaps or the hammer cracks, then it’s off to the trash heap.

Your daughter is different....

Based on commercials for nutritional supplements, or even a trip down the supermarket aisle, you might get the impression that your food just isn’t nutritious enough. Why just stick to eating fruits and veggies when you can get an extra boost from supplements that put good things like...

An estimated two million children are being homeschooled in the United States. Scholars studying homeschooling often talk about the academic achievement of homeschoolers or their social skills.

But, as important as those things are, they are not...

Most of us have by now received new credit cards in the mail embedded with “EMV” (Europay-MasterCard-Visa) chips. Merchants across the country have been hastily investing large amounts of money in new EMV-compliant terminals.

This is because today marks the moment that retailers...

Like any long-distance relationship, our love affair with Mars has had its ups and downs. The planet’s red tint made it a distinctive – but ominous...

Over the last decade, the world has witnessed a number of significant clashes between the rights of free of speech and respect for religion.

On a Sunday evening in May this year, two men in Garland, Texas shot an unarmed security guard at a Muhammad-focused art...

Metals are crucial to society and enable our modern standard of living. Look around and you can’t help but see products made of metals. For instance, a typical gasoline-powered automobile contains over a ton of iron and steel, 240 pounds of...

After seven years of preparation and several billion dollars spent, Shell has decided to abandon its exploration program in the US Arctic “for the foreseeable future.” This follows barely two months’ drilling in the...

These days, when most of us think of a “book,” we have in mind something around nine inches by six inches, with mass market paperbacks shaving off an inch or two in each dimension.

But digital reading has redefined presuppositions about size and, more importantly, about what format is...

In early September, the government of Pakistan joined an exclusive club.

It became the fourth government in the world – following the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel – to use an armed drone to conduct a targeted killing.

In doing so, it shattered the assumption that armed drones and...