Some people love to swear and can’t get enough of it. But you’ll occasionally hear complaints that if we’re not careful, we might overuse profanity and wear it out, forcing us then to come up with new swear words or – worse yet – do without swearing...

When our universe first blasted into existence with a Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago, it looked much different than it does today. Instead of planets, stars and galaxies, there was...

While the U.S. brings home more Olympic gold than any other country, many, if not most, American school kids wouldn’t even bring home a tin, if there were such a low-ranking medal.

Recently, colleagues and I set out to see how the fitness of American kids stacked up relative to other countries. Our findings were surprising. Not only did the...

Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Oct. 3 “for his discoveries of the mechanisms for autophagy”, which is how cells “recycle” their contents. Autophagy is a quality control mechanism that destroys...

Have you ever pulled out your camera or phone in a museum or historic place and suddenly found a staff person telling you “no photographs”?

I was in London recently and it happened repeatedly in places like Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and Parliament.

The no-photos policy is not limited to just England but is a worldwide...

The story of Christopher Columbus, as with all legends, involves a series of great successes and horrible failures.

Columbus’s current favorability rating hovers somewhere close to those of Hillary Clinton and...

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. Following rulings in such cases as Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, U.S. law has established that...

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the debate stage Sunday evening. We asked three scholars from the Washington University in St. Louis, where the debate was held, to pick a key quote from the evening and tell us why it was important.

Rebecca Wanzo

“This was locker room talk.” - Trump

Donald Trump defended the content of a video leaked...

The 2016 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, three theoretical physicists whose research used the unexpected mathematical lens of topology to investigate phases of matter and the transitions between them.

Topology is...

The news that Juan Manuel Santos of Columbia has received the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end his nation’s decades-old civil war is notable in part because the number of contenders for this year’s award set a new record. There were total of 376 nominees, 228 individuals and 148 organizations.

It also serves as an...