Since the 1980s biologists have used genetic engineering to express novel traits in crop plants. Over the last 20 years, these crops have been grown on more than one billion acres in the United States and globally. Despite their rapid adoption by...

As we use more and more data every year, where will we have room to store it all? Our rapidly increasing demand for web apps, file sharing and social networking, among other services, relies on information storage in the “cloud” – always-on Internet-connected remote servers that store, manage and process data. This in turn has...

Some 150 years ago, if you wanted to listen to music, you would have to perform it yourself or be in the presence of musicians.

With Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877 came the ability to record music. At that point, the ways that people could...

A recent study by the National Institutes of Health found that more than one in three people in the United States have experienced pain of some sort in the previous three months. Of these, approximately 50 million suffer from chronic or severe pain.

To put these numbers in perspective, 21 million...

Pico Rivera is a dusty working-class Latino suburb of Los Angeles. After the school district, Wal-Mart is the city’s largest employer and the source of 10 percent of its tax revenue. More than 500 families in the town depend on income from the store.

The town is also the epicenter of activism by...

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.

Author and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote these words in 1949, and they are all the more important today.

As we enter the 21st century and today’s children look forward to living in the...

“Unbreakable," M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film, dwells on the theme of human fragility and the search for a human being impervious to injuries that would kill the rest of us. It turns out that this quest is not quite so fanciful as it might first seem. Scientists have identified a small...

As robots become integrated into society more widely, we need to be sure they’ll behave well among us. In 1942, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov attempted to lay out a philosophical and moral framework for ensuring robots serve humanity, and guarding against their...

Every day, millions of people take to search engines with common concerns, such as “How can I lose weight?” or “How can I be productive?” In return, they find articles that offer simple advice and quick solutions,...

For better or worse, many of us never forget high school: the unrequited romantic crushes, chronic embarrassment, desperate struggles for popularity, sexual awakening, parental pressure and, above all else, competition – social, athletic, academic.

T...