On the red planet, amid arid desert and rolling mountain ranges, six sleekly space suited astronauts grope their way back to their launch vehicle, fleeing a sudden and vicious wind storm.

Pelted and blinded by sand and metal, one of them is struck...

The Beastie Boys were talking about parties, not trademarks, when they sang, “You gotta fight! For your right!”

But even getting a trademark can be a fight in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. Today, October 2, a federal court will consider whether the Asian-American dance rock band The...

Listening to President Obama and other supporters of the Iranian nuclear agreement, one might well be justified in thinking back to the ill-fated Maginot Line – one of the most ineffective security strategies used in Europe before...

Exxon is well-known as a key architect of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against the regulation of greenhouse gases, an effort that took off in 1989 with the founding of the Global Climate Coalition.

It involved mo...

In the library world, access to information is a human right, not to be tampered with or controlled in any way.

The books that line the shelves have been carefully selected by a trained librarian to...

As I write this, #Peeple is the top trending topic in my Twitter sidebar. The web is bemused and irate about an app that will let people rate other people as if they were baubles purchased on Amazon.

Its cofounders, Nicole McCullough and Julia Cordray, plan to launch the app in...

These days, most of us accept that minds are dependent on brain function and wouldn’t object to the claim that “You are your brain.” After all, we’ve known for a long time that brains control how we behave, what we...

Over 100,000 people in the US are waiting for a kidney transplant. Most of the kidneys that were transplanted in 2014 (about 17,000 transplants) are from deceased donors. Kidneys donated from living donors last longer, but the number of living donors has dropped over the past decade.

Ethnic and...

What is going on in the minds of young children when it seems they are daydreaming or appear to be scatterbrained?

A study that my coauthor, Susanne A Denham, and I conducted recently shows that inattentive children may sometimes be absorbed in...

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....