If you put water on the stove and heat it up, it will at first just get hotter and hotter. You may then conclude that heating water results only in hotter water. But at some point everything changes – the water starts to boil, turning from hot liquid into steam. Physicists...

Throughout the summer before my daughter left for college, I repeatedly warned her: never put a glass down at a party; use the buddy system when going to parties; and never go upstairs at a fraternity party.

Instead, what I should have told her is: the place you are most likely to...

Inequality. Economic recession. Wage stagnation. These are the buzzwords of the populist uprisings on both the left and the right during this 2016 election season. Although they’re running strikingly different campaigns, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both capitalizing on anger with the so-called “elites” in the United...

Few product launches in recent memory have captured as much attention as last week’s unveiling of the Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle (EV), Tesla’s first vehicle pitched at the mass market.

Orders were flooding in even...

Visit any preschool classroom during free play and you will likely see a child pretending to be someone else. Make-believe play is a ubiquitous part of early childhood. And beyond being fun for kids, pretending and other kinds of imaginative play are also believed by some to be critical to healthy...

Bernie Sanders is on a roll.

He has won six of the last seven Democratic nominating contests, including an impressive victory over Hillary Clinton in the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday. He outraised Clinton by US$15 million in March and trails her by only one percentage point in the most recent national poll of Democratic primary voters.

As the...

The news is currently filled with stories of corruption.

A global group of media outlets just broke the story of secret offshore bank accounts in Panama, which suggests widespread corruption in the Russian government and elsewhere. For months, stories of the Brazilian government’s bribery scandal have filled the news. Other headline-grabbing...

Last week, President Obama criticized journalists covering the election for “the practice of drawing ‘false equivalences’ between competing claims made by politicians.”

“If I say the world is round and someone else says it’s flat, that’s worth reporting,” he said. “But you might also want to...

Drones – and promises about drones – seem ubiquitous these days. And some of what we associate with drones comes with varying degrees of scariness.

We think of automated planes shooting missiles, drones flying near sensitive nuclear power plants or quadcopters crashing into crowds while filming. If we think about everyday possibilities,...

On February 16, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the ASTRO-H satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The space telescope named Hitomi – “pupil” in Japanese – carried with it the hopes and dreams of astrophysicists from around the world.

Hito...