Teeth have been big news lately. First, there was the issue of whether flossing really helps lower the risk for tooth decay and gingivitis.

And now, questions about how often we really need to get dental X-rays have made the news.

The bottom line is that, clinically, these are complex issues that can’t easily be reduced to a simple soundbite.

Ma...

Q: Why did the woman cross the road?

A: Who cares! What the hell is she doing out of the kitchen?

Q: Why hasn’t NASA sent a woman to the moon?

A: It doesn’t need cleaning yet!

These two jokes represent disparagement humor – any attempt to amuse through the denigration of a social group...

Children across the U.S. have now returned to school. Many of these children are going to schools with sworn police officers patrolling the hallways. These officers, usually called school resource officers, are placed in schools across the country to help maintain school safety.

Accordi...

Fifty years ago – on Sept. 8, 1966 – TV viewers were transfixed by the appearance on screen of a green-hued, pointy-eared alien called Spock. But beneath the makeup, actor Leonard Nimoy fretted that this would be the end of his promising career.

“How can I play a character without emotion?” he asked his boss, Gene...

A January 2015 Pew Research Center study found an alarming chasm between the views of scientists and the views of the public. Here is just a sampling:

87 percent of scientists accept that...

It’s back-to-school time in the United States, and for countless children across the nation, it’s also time to get back into the school garden.

For centuries, educators and philosophers have argued that garden-based learning improves children’s intelligence and boosts their personal health. In recent...

Imagine you’re a detective working on a murder case. You have a body, but you believe it was moved from another location. Now what? There’s one unexpected tool you might use to follow up on this suspicion: forensic palynology. That’s...

In one of television’s more bizarre recent offerings, the History Channel show “Appalachian Outlaws” follows a band of West Virginians as they hunt rugged forests for American ginseng, a medicinal root worth...

On Sept. 1, officials in Florida reported that mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus had been found in Miami Beach. The Florida Department of Health reports 49 non-travel related cases of Zika. There are almost 2,700 cases of travel-associated cases in the continental U.S. Things are worse in the U.S. territories, where more than 14,000 locally...

Earlier this year, I wrote about a cache of bitter writings by Woody Guthrie that I had discovered while conducting research for a book on the balladeer.

The invectives were directed against a man Guthrie had...