Standing at the South Pole is the next-best thing to being on another planet. If you walk a few hundred yards away from the buildings that make up the National Science Foundation’s research station, you see a featureless plain of snow and ice, most...

Chances are that by the time you enter college in the United States, the closest thing you’ve had to reproductive education was watching an uncomfortable video in health class, maybe even before you went through puberty. It might not have answered your questions and perhaps led...

The smell of cinnamon wafts through the air. My guard is down; resistance is futile. Like a zombie, I roll my luggage across the airport food court and stand in line to pay too much for what I don’t even want, a diet-killing Cinnabon.

I have been phished, at...

Perhaps on the outside looking in, the events at the University of Missouri appear baffling. They’re not.

I taught there from 1996 to 2008. The recent racist incidents and lackadaisical administration response, which sparked the amazing display of student solidarity, is part...

By now, you’ve surely heard that Americans aren’t getting enough sleep.

In our always-on society, a solid chunk of nightly rest seems, well, like a dream. We shave the edges of sleep to keep up, exchanging extra waking hours for compromised healt...

Talk of “coywolves” – a blend of coyote and wolf – is everywhere. There is a PBS special called Meet the Coywolf, a recent article in the Economist, and it is now trending on Facebook. The media really love this new animal name.

There is no...

On Monday afternoon, after days of protests against his failure to address urgent concerns over racism on campus, the University of Missouri’s President Tim Wolfe resigned.

This may have alleviated the immediate tension in Columbia, Missouri, but the...

Canada, paradoxically, is a leader in climate change mitigation at the same time as being one of the world’s laggards. It carries both legacies as its delegates prepare to attend the COP 21 climate change conference in Paris later this month –...

Between 1988 and 2013, the number of cases of polio worldwide plummeted from 350,000 to 406. The number of countries in which the disease was endemic also went down,...

If you haven’t heard by now, the American press recently picked up on an interesting linguistic phenomenon in Norway, where the word “Texas” is slang for “crazy.”

Indeed, it turns out that...