As automated and autonomous vehicles become more common on U.S. roads, it’s worth a look at what these machines can – and can’t – do. At the University of Michigan’s Mcity, where I serve as director, we’re working...

In a nod of appreciation to Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem announced that it would like to change its name to Beitar “Trump” Jerusalem.

The...

It is easy to frame conservation as a clash between environmentalists and polluters. But this view can greatly oversimplify many complex choices. What does conservation look like when ideas about nature cut across political lines?

In my book, “Chemical Lands: Pesticides, Aerial Spraying and Health in North America’s...

Wind and solar energy are growing rapidly in the U.S. As these energy sources become a bigger part of the electricity mix, their growth raises new questions: How do solar and wind influence energy prices? And since power plants last for decades, what should...

A recent national survey reported that millennials are struggling with their knowledge of the Holocaust. The survey results show that 22 percent of millennials have not heard of, or...

The HIV virus, which causes AIDS, has long been known to target and disable cells of the immune system, which are responsible for fighting off invading microorganisms and for suppressing malignant cancers. More recently,...

The Standard Model. What dull name for the most accurate scientific theory known to human beings.

More than a quarter of the Nobel Prizes in physics of the last century are direct inputs to or direct results of the Standard Model. Yet its name suggests that if you can afford a few...

The U.S. population has changed substantially in the last half century, growing by nearly 63 percent.

Perhaps the two most prominent demographic changes over the past 50 years relate to age. In 1968, the baby boom had just ended, and the oldest members of its cohort were only 22 years old.

As...

While researching how hard it is for low-income Americans to eat healthy on tight budgets, I’ve often found a mismatch between what people want to eat and the diet they can afford to follow. This made me wonder what eating right costs and how much of this tab gets covered by...

Henry Minter was working as a farm laborer in Georgia in the 1870s when he met Mary Dotson, a young black servant girl. The couple never married – which would have been illegal at the time – but they stayed together until Henry’s death.

Mary, who was left with their four children,...