Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH that next airs on Tuesday, May 24 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

There is a long way to go before transgender people throughout the United States are treated...

From Wall Street to politics, quantitative analysts (or quants) are revolutionizing much of the world. Nowadays, that even includes horse racing.

By using computers to identify hidden patterns in past racing data and arcane mathematics to optimize every aspect of their betting strategies, horse racing quants can confidently wager staggering...

On Thursday, May 19, EgyptAir flight MS804, traveling from Paris to Cairo, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea. All 66 passengers and crew members aboard were killed. Terrorism is suspected.

This is the fifth major airline crash since the beginning of this year, a fact that may cause some people to wonder if flying is as safe as we’ve been...

A mysterious set of 9,000-year-old bones, unearthed nearly 20 years ago in Washington, is finally going home. Following bitter...

Sitting quietly in the corner, we watch a daily family ritual: in the living room awash with soft afternoon light, a six-year-old boy is sitting on the floor, controller in hand, eyes firmly on the television screen. His fingers expertly...

Fully 92 percent of American teenagers go online daily. More than half of them do so several times a day and a quarter are online “almost constantly.”

I’m a mother of two teenagers who fall into that latter category. And as a parent and a teacher educator, I work on ways...

Everyone loves a good story, but can a good story lead to love?

Storytelling is a fundamental form of communication, and research has demonstrated the power of narratives to change minds and influence behavior.

For example, personal narratives are often used in advertising and health campaigns, and have led to an incre...

“Cure” is a word that’s dominated the rhetoric in the war on cancer for decades. But it’s a word that medical professionals tend to avoid. While the American Cancer Society reports that cancer treatment has improved...

“And when she was good, she was very, very good,

But when she was bad she was horrid.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem may have befit Houston’s air around 1999, when the city briefly ranked as the “New U.S. Smog Capital.” Back then, leaks and flares from local...

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) continues to take a tremendous toll on human health, with 37 million people infected and 1.2 million deaths worldwide in 2014. In sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV epidemic has been most devastating, more than 25 million people are HIV-infected, about 70 percent of the global total.

But as of 2014, only about 1...