Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH that will next air on Tuesday, May 10 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

The...

Millions of Americans are struggling to pay for college. Nearly 10 million students and their families took out almost US$100 billion in student loans from the federal government in the 2014-15 academic year, pushing outstanding student loan debt to mor...

On March 15 this year, Mexico City encountered its worst environmental crisis of the last decade. A gray fog, comprising noxious air pollutants, cast a shadow over the sprawling metropolitan area for two days. Vehicles were...

Even armed with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, I remember the frightening first moments after bringing my newborn daughter home from the hospital. I wasn’t sure what to do – and not at all confident that I was capable of being the parent she needed me...

Lots of women look forward to motherhood – getting to know a tiny baby, raising a growing child, developing a relationship with a maturing son or daughter. All over the world, people believe that parenting is the most rewarding part of life. And it’s good that so many mothers treasure that...

Pregnancy sounds like the ultimate form of animal cooperation – mothers share their own bodies to grow and support their children’s prenatal development. But in reality, embryos use every trick in the book to take more than their fair share. Mothers, in turn,...

The stakes are high for Marvel and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates to do Black Panther well. The character appears this month in the blockbuster “Captain America: Civil War,” a prelude to the film he’ll headline in 2018. And last month, Coates released the first issue of a new Black Panther comic series.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is a simple but powerful framework that explains how complexity can come from simplicity: how everything biological around us – from the microbial biofilms on your teeth to the majestic redwood trees – emerged from the very...

There is a common thread that connects the hack into the sluicegate controllers of the Bowman Avenue dam in Rye, New York; the breach that compromised 20 million federal employee records at the Office of Personnel Management; and the recent spate of “ransomware”...

If you are a parent or a teacher, you most probably read stories to young children. Together, you laugh and point at the pictures. You engage them with a few simple questions. And they respond.

So what happens to children when they participate in shared reading? Does...