With the New Year approaching, we highlight the top arts and culture stories from 2015.

Over the past year, there was no shortage of news events, artistic breakthroughs and cultural trends to write about. As always, we tried to provide an interesting twist to supplement existing coverage.

With...

As we eye a brand new year, it’s good to look back and see what stories 2015 brought us. Here is a look at what kept the health and medicine desk busy over the past year.

Thinking about the immune system

At this time last year, a measles outbreak was brewing in...

There are a number of definitions of science, as both a process and a body of knowledge. At root, it’s an effort to understand the world around us via observation and...

Just days after the Paris terrorist attacks on November 13, the iconic mask of Guy Fawkes appeared – again – in two videos released in French by the hacktivist techno-social collective Anonymous. This time, they declared a total war on the Islamic State, or ISIS,...

On December 21, the company SpaceX made history by successfully launching a rocket and returning it to a safe landing on Earth. It’s also the day that SpaceX founder Elon Musk was nominated for a Luddite Award.

The nomination came as part of a campaign by the Information...

“The end of television” is a headline that’s been liberally thrown around for the past 15 years.

Indeed, the past year saw audiences becoming more and more amenable to adopting new ways to watch TV shows, with live audiences for broadcast and cable programs declin...

In the American West, unprecedented droughts have caused extreme water shortages. The current drought in California and across the West is entering its fourth year, with precipitation and water storage reaching record low levels.

Such drought and water scarcity are only likely to...

More than a thousand times farther from Earth than the moon, farther even than the sun, an extraordinary extraterrestrial expedition is taking place. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is exploring dwarf planet...

Walking across campus to my office each morning this semester, I’ve found it hard to ignore the growing number of students using hoverboards to get around. These two-wheel self-balancing boards (they don’t really hover, Back-to-the-Future-style) are one of the hottest...

There are many social norms that dictate gift-giving, including when, how and what to give as gifts.

Interestingly, these norms don’t seem to be about making sure that recipients get the gifts they want. What makes for a good or bad gift often differs in the eyes of...