Drones – and promises about drones – seem ubiquitous these days. And some of what we associate with drones comes with varying degrees of scariness.

We think of automated planes shooting missiles, drones flying near sensitive nuclear power plants or quadcopters crashing into crowds while filming. If we think about everyday possibilities,...

On February 16, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) successfully launched the ASTRO-H satellite from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The space telescope named Hitomi – “pupil” in Japanese – carried with it the hopes and dreams of astrophysicists from around the world.

Hito...

States have traditionally provided funding for public colleges and universities based on a combination of the number of students enrolled and how much money they were allocated previously.

But, in the face of increasingly tight budgets and pressures to demonstrate...

This week The Conversation US kicks off a collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from WGBH TV that debates a topic that Americans care about – without the shouting.

Up for discussion on Tuesday at 11 PM Eastern/10 PM Central on PBS and at pbs.org is the health of the American Dream. Is it dead or alive?

University of Texas...

The news is currently filled with stories of corruption.

A global group of media outlets just broke the story of secret offshore bank accounts in Panama, which suggests widespread corruption in the Russian government and elsewhere. For months, stories of the Brazilian government’s bribery scandal have filled the news. Other headline-grabbing...

A persistent question raised in this presidential election cycle is whether assumptions about American politics need to be rewritten, especially those related to money.

The rise of self-funded Donald Trump and small-donor-supported Senator Bernie Sanders has led some to argue that we should worry much less about the...

Last week North Carolina became the first state to pass a law requiring transgender individuals (including students) to use only bathrooms that match their biological (rather than identified) gender. They did so in response to an ordinance...

If we are serious about long-term human presence in space, such as manned bases on the moon or Mars, we must figure out how to streamline human-robot interactions.

Right now, even the most basic of robots seem to have...

Imagine you went to your basement and dusted off the laptop or mobile phone that you used in 2002. What would happen if you tried to turn it on? We don’t have to guess. Around the country this election year, people are going into storage, pulling out computers that date back to 2002 and asking us to vote on them.

Following an election meltdown...

The worlds of science, technology and patent law eagerly await the U.S. government’s decision on who deserves patents on what many have referred to as the biotechnology invention of the century: the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technique.

Scientists hail CRISPR/Cas9...