“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...

In Brazil, right-wing parties and politicians are following constitutional procedures to oust the country’s democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. They claim that she made improper use of budgetary procedures to bolster her 2014 reelection campaign.

The left calls it an illegitimate coup. They believe the ultimate goal is gutting...

One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the American worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

That’s even turned some pro free-trade Republicans into protectionists. As a result, the candidates are promising to bring these jobs...

Philosophy has been a favorite whipping boy in the culture wars since 399 B.C., when an Athenian jury sentenced Socrates to death. Nowadays, philosophers are no longer accused of “corrupting the youth.” Instead, a surprisingly wide range of pundits, from celebrity scientist...

The Obama Administration issued new rules this week that will allow millions more Americans to qualify for overtime pay.

The Labor Department regulation, which will take effect in December, will double the annual threshold that helps determine who qualifies for overtime when they work more than...

Over roughly the past 10 years, the United States has experienced remarkable growth in the production of natural gas and oil. This growth has taken place across dozens of regions, from the scrub of west Texas to the plains...

Hospital infections affect almost two million people in the United States every year, 100,000 of whom die. Up to 70 percent of these infections could be prevented if health care workers follow recommended protocols, which include hand hygiene.

To me as a physician who studies health quality, it often...

There are more than 865 encryption tools in use worldwide, all addressing different aspects of a common problem. People want to protect information: hard drives from oppressive governments, physical location from stalkers, browsing history...

Imagine you’re a cat, and, every time you meowed, the loud voice of a snooty-sounding British gentleman kindly informed your human guardian of your every thought and feeling (well, the thoughts and feelings you had before you were terrified by the sound of the...