The jewels in many an urban school district’s crown are their exam schools, competitive public schools that base enrollment on test scores. With a school like New York’s Stuyvesant, Boston Latin or Walter Payton (in Chicago) on their transcript,...

Biodiversity refers to the variety of all living things on Earth, but people often have very specific ideas of what it means. If you run an online search for images of biodiversity, you are likely to find lots of photos of...

Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest person, trails his peers when it comes to generosity. His family’s donations to hospitals, museums and universities rarely make headlines, and he hasn’t signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment by many of the world’s richest people to give away most of their wealth.

So when the Amazon...

U.S. intelligence agencies – 17 of them – agree that evidence shows the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee and waged a campaign to influence voters in 2016.

Although no evidence...

Sometime around 2011 or 2012, it suddenly became very easy to predict what people would be doing in public places: Most would be looking down at their phones.

For years, mobile phones weren’t much to look at. The screens were small, and users needed to press the same key...

The Grenfell Tower fire in London has triggered questions about how the tragedy could have happened, whether it could happen elsewhere, and what might be learned from it to prevent future disasters. As a professor of fire protection engineering, I know that the answers are not simple, and the fixes not quick.

Investigations into...

India recently tried to reduce the use of cash in its economy by eliminating, overnight, two of its most widely used bills in what was called demonetization.

While the effort – initially explained as an attempt to curb “black money” – has been a failure in...

The Trump administration aims to slash spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, by US$193 billion over the next decade. The proposal would also overhaul how the nation’s main nutrition assistance...

For decades, textbooks were seen as the foundation for instruction in American schools. These discipline-specific tomes were a fundamental part of the educational infrastructure, assigned to students...

On June 27, the ATM turns 50. Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker once described it as the “only useful innovation in banking.” But today, the cash that ATMs dispense may be on the endangered list.

Cash is being displaced in so many ways...