Current Events

For nearly two centuries, courts have relied on the subjective “reasonable person standard” to solve legal disputes. Now, science can help.

Hospitals often deal with the aftermath of gun violence, but they can play a key role in preventing it.

Higher education, particularly for fields like filmmaking, is in big trouble when a world-class education can be found online cheaply or even for free.

Our chart shows new additions since 1984 that have stuck around.

Three ideas could help create the police force that Americans want.

A socially minded franchise model makes money while improving society.

In ancient Greece, the Olympics were never solely about the athletes themselves.

An unconventional solution to the problem of violence.

While we can see many solar storms coming, some are “stealthy.” A new study shows how to detect them.

A new episode of “Your Brain on Money” illuminates the strange world of consumer behavior and explores how brands can wreak havoc on our ability to make rational decisions.

Powerful branding can not only change how you feel about a company, it can actually change how your brain is wired.

The ethical debate over zoos is going to grow louder. There might be a solution that involves robots.

A new government report describes 144 sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena.

English is a dynamic language, and this summer’s new additions to dictionary.com tell us a lot about how we’re living.

Some of these trends may be due, in part, to the lockdown.

Nearly 90% of the world’s blind live in low-income countries.

As air pollution increases, so does violent crime.

New research shines a light on the genetics of sudden cardiac deaths.

In each of our minds, we draw a demarcation line between beliefs that are reasonable and those that are nonsense. Where do you draw your line?

A brief passage from a recent UN report describes what could be the first-known case of an autonomous weapon, powered by artificial intelligence, killing in the battlefield.

A year of disruptions to work has contributed to mass burnout.

According to this research, eight percent of Americans always refuse vaccines. Why?

The number of PhDs has been exceeding the available academic positions since as early as the mid-1990s.

Too few babies — not overpopulation — is likely to be a major problem this century.

How our fantasy world of the past has become everyday reality.

Many workers moved home on the promise or hope that they’d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended.

Virtual tourism has thus far been a futuristic dream, but a world shaped by Covid-19 may be ready to accept it.

We have pipelines for oil and natural gas. Why not water?

Contact-tracing apps can be a useful tool for public health, but they have considerable false positive and false negative rates.

Political partisanship might be a treatable condition.