Last month President Obama welcomed the film Selma into the White House – a first-family showing that, as it happens, occurred a century after the first-ever screening of a movie inside the White House…
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Search for information on ‘self-medication,’ and you’ll likely find descriptions of the myriad ways that we humans use drugs to solve problems. In fact, the consumption of biologically active molecules…
When you think about substance use and teens, drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy might come to mind. But recreational prescription drug use is a significant problem. Nationally, 17.8% of high school students…
President Vladimir Putin of Russia may fear that the internet is a CIA project, but unfortunately he is not alone. According to our recently released study about how the Russian public views the internet…
A year after the Maidan revolution of 2014, Ukraine is at a critical juncture. The conflict with Russia has been escalating. Estimates of casualties exceed 5,000, with some reports putting the number at…
Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something…
Each year in the United States about 720,000 people have heart attacks and about 124,000 people in the UK and 55,000 people in Australia will have them as well. Since the 1980s, survival rates from heart…
Even as the US economic recovery remains subpar with employment gains in only the lowest-paying jobs – and sluggish gains at that – one segment is surging: the still-nascent app industry. Apple’s latest…
If a guy kills three of his neighbors over a parking spot, it’s a local story, maybe a national news brief. Its newsworthiness is predicated on the appalling flimsiness of the casus belli: Some folks are…
Let’s start with some old news. Earth’s climate is warming, human activities are causing it, and as long as we continue to dump greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the impacts on climate and…
Whether man-made sources of mercury are contributing to the mercury levels in open-ocean fish has been the subject of hot debate for many years. My colleagues Carl Lamborg, Marty Horgan and I analyzed…
When New York Times’ columnist David Carr prepared to apply for a newly created professorship in Boston University’s College of Communication, he realized he’d need a curriculum vitae, the so-called CV…
Records show that the Egyptian state provided health care to workers building royal tombs more than 3,000 years ago. But it was more about productivity than altruism.
This was the year the Superbowl adfest finally hit the skids. The Twitter-storm that greeted this year’s supposedly iconic ads suggests they simply didn’t work like they usually do. The Los Angeles Times…
On January 11 1999, when Jon Stewart took over as host of The Daily Show from Craig Kilborn, no one could have predicted that, 16 years later, Stewart would become an icon of satire. Under Kilborn, the…
Your intestines are home to many different kinds of bacteria (and some non-bacterial organisms as well). Together they’re called the “gut microbiome.” They come from the food you eat – and whatever else…
Many of us have asked ourselves in the past few days: can you really falsely remember something as significant as being in a helicopter that was shot down? And many of us probably think “No way,” and quickly…
Charlie Baker is the new Governor of Massachusetts and, doggone it, he likes government. Though this notion is antithetical to most elite Republican office holders, Governor Baker is firmly in the blue…
Graham Beal, the Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, recently announced that he will be retiring after fifteen years at the helm. Two of his achievements particularly stand out. The first is his…
It’s that time of year when the stakes can feel very high when choosing a chocolate for your sweetie. Yet the options are more bountiful and confounding than ever. Valentine’s Day chocolates in a growing…
Photosynthesis – turning the sun’s energy into food for plants – is the biological system that feeds the world. But despite its awesome power, the process is extremely inefficient. We can’t really blame…
Toothaches and root canals loom large in the collective memory and the whine of a dentist’s drill conjures unpleasant memories for most. Tooth decay and cavities most commonly affect the enamel that protects…
Just the other day I found myself in the waiting room of an automotive dealership. While my car was being serviced, I flipped through a product brochure. One ad for an oil change boasted that it would…
Despite the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, January and February were not kind months for the people of Boston and New England. By February 10th, more than 60 inches of snow in 30 days fell on the city…
Until 1950 the Red Cross segregated blood. It was thousands of African-Americans during World War II who forced the Red Cross to include them as donors and helped pave the way for activism of the 1960s.