To many Americans, it feels as if the world is becoming a more violent place. Besieged nightly with video of conflicts across the Afghanistan, Nigeria, the Middle East and Ukraine, it would be easy to draw that conclusion.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the opposite is true: fewer people die in wars than ever before.

The world...

Citing a rule that barred all images displaying drugs and alcohol, an official of a middle school in Vermont told Zachary Guiles in 2004 to remove a t-shirt that called President George W Bush a “chicken hawk,” showed three lines of cocaine, a razor blade and a portrait of the...

Protests against austerity continue to roil parts of Europe, most recently in Brussels earlier this month when 100,000 people took to the streets and police deployed water cannons.

This type of public and occasionally violent demonstration has been taking place across Europe since...

If nutrition had a World Series, iron would never make the playoffs. Vitamin A scores home runs for preventing childhood blindness. Folic acid knocks it out of the park by preventing devastating birth defects. Iodine throws a shut-out by protecting a...

With Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina running for president, many might think that women are finally achieving gender equality in politics.

That is not the case.

In North Carolina, California, Kansas and other states, the progress women have made in seeking elected office has...

Hurricane Patricia drew immediate attention by intensifying from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in a single day. It soon developed the fastest winds ever recorded in a western hemisphere storm. Meteorologists and climate scientists have already...

An uproar ensued after it was reported that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) – southern Oregon’s 80-year-old annual theatrical extravaganza – would be commissioning playwrights to “translate” all...

Facebook wants to blanket rural India in cheap Wi-Fi. Google is launching balloons to do the same around the globe. Soon, it seems, there won’t be a square inch of Earth or the heavens that isn’t connected.

These ambitious plans beg the question: should there be places in the...

Children are manifesting increased rates of adult diseases like hypertension or high triglycerides. And they are getting diseases that used to be unheard of in children, like Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. So why is this happening?

Everyone assumes this is the result of the obesity...

What does it look like when a university decides to walk the walk as well as talk the talk on climate change? The University of California system – which encompasses 10 university campuses and two national scientific research laboratories – is about to find out.

Two years ago, Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of...