When Thomas Edison wanted a filament for his light bulb, he scoured the globe collecting thousands of candidates before settling on bamboo. (It was years before people were able to make tungsten...

Reproductive health isn’t just about abortions, despite all the attention they get. It’s also about access to family planning services, contraception, sex education and much else.

Such access lets women control the timing and size of their families so they have children when they are financially secure and emotionally ready and can...

Being a kindergartner today is very different from being a kindergartner 20 years ago. In fact it is more like first grade.

Researchers have demonstrated that five-year-olds are spending more time engaged in teacher-led academic learning activities than play-based learning opportunities...

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But apparently a woman scorned is also the foundation of a creative tour de force.

On HBO this past Saturday – in a time slot generally reserved for feature films – Beyoncé released “Lemonade,” a series of music videos compiled into a short film that’s both eclectically...

For the past 10 months, Donald Trump has been a political enigma. Against the predictions of journalists, policy wonks and odds makers, a tabloid darling with no political experience and few coherent policies is now poised to be the Republican nominee for president.

Hundreds of journalists and political scientists have tried to explain...

Donald Trump is the Republican establishment’s worst nightmare, but the GOP leadership can’t find a way to stop him.

Tuesday night provided the latest example. The New York billionaire swept all five of the GOP primaries, winning Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.

Trump’s victory margins were...

This week our collaborators at the PBS debate show Point Taken focus on the cost of university tuition: is it worth it?

Writing for The Conversation, Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University argues that it is – and not just to individual students but also to the states and communities in which they live. His question is:...

In case you’ve forgotten the section on the food web from high school biology, here’s a quick refresher.

Plants make up the base of every food chain of the food web (also called the food cycle). Plants use available sunlight to convert water from the soil and...

A recent report by The Education Trust, a nonprofit working on educational justice, reveals that while there has been an improvement in graduation rates at four-year public institutions for all students, the improvement is smaller for black students.

According to the report, the gaps in graduation rates between black and white students have either...

Even though most people don’t know much about chemicals in general or poisons in particular, virtually everyone knows that arsenic is bad. In the first century, arsenic was already known to be a deadly poison . However, it was the Borgias in the 14th and 15th centuries who perfected...