With America in the middle of a flourishing craft beer and craft spirits movement, it’s easy to forget that Prohibition was once the law of the land.

One hundred years ago, on Jan. 16, 1919, Nebraska became the 36th of the...

Of course you know that eating is vital to your survival, but have you ever thought about how your brain controls how much you eat, when you eat and what you eat?

This is not a trivial question, because two-thirds of Americans are either...

Technology companies have been pummeled by revelations about how poorly they protect their customers’ personal information, including an in-depth New York Times report detailing the ability of smartphone apps to track users’ locations. Some companies, most notably...

I conduct a lot of in-depth interviews with people like a woman I’ll call Angie as part of my work as a political scientist who studies poverty and public policy. When I asked the low-income mother of two, who works multiple jobs but still struggles to care for her...

There are two things that connect the names Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Noether. One is their outstanding breadth of contributions to the field of mathematics. The other is that each was a professor at the same university in Göttingen, Germany.

Although...

When New York and Chicago decided to expand their public bike share systems a few years back, city officials wanted to go about it democratically. Using community meetings, workshops and...

The current government shutdown is now the longest in American history, affecting about 800,000 federal employees out of 1.8 million full-time civil servants, not counting military personnel and postal workers.

Of those, about 380,000 have been furloughed, meaning that they cannot work or get paid. The rest, whose positions are categorized as...

I experienced déjà vu when I took care of a child with acute flaccid myelitis in 2014, one of the first cases of its kind at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in many years.

I had taken care of polio patients in India in 1990s and...

If President Donald Trump declares a national emergency to fund some portion of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border without congressional authorization, what would happen next?

Would the courts step in? What is Congress’ role?

As I explain in my book “Emergency Presidential Power,” presidents generally claim emergency power two...

When the U.S. government shuts down, much of the science that it supports is not spared. And there is no magic light switch that can be flipped to reverse the impact.

For instance, large-scale instruments like NASA’s Stratoscopher...