Falling oil prices threaten to slow the US drilling boom. The downturn has also increased calls to lift the ban on exporting oil and natural gas from the US – an outdated policy that should be changed…
The BICEP2 telescope at twilight at the South Pole. The supporting data for the inflation of the universe have also gone off into the sunset.
Steffen Richter, Harvard University
Last March, the BICEP2 collaboration announced that they had used a microwave telescope at the South Pole to detect primordial gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in spacetime would be the first proof…
More doctors, more antibiotics?
Pills via Dragon Images/Shutterstock
The World Bank recently forecast that remittances to developing countries will total more than US$450 billion this year, a bit bigger than Venezuela’s economy and more than double a decade a go. Given…
Recent events in Paris – the massacre at the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo in the 11th arrondissement and the hostage situation at a supermarket near Porte de Vincennes – committed by terrorists with…
Longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer Lillian Ross once admonished aspiring reporters not to write about themselves. “As a reporter, serve your subject,” she wrote, “do not serve yourself. Do not…
To avoid a ‘food versus fuel’ conflict, researchers are exploring bioenergy crops optimized for biofuel.
Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center
Over the past decade, there have numerous efforts to replace petroleum-based fuels with fuel made from plants, or biofuels. One challenge to commercializing biofuel made from non-food sources — called…
Frustrated by having to keep up with false social norms?
Boy via michaeljung/Shutterstock
Mobile payments will be one of the hottest businesses in 2015 as consumers increasingly swap cash and credit cards for their smartphones. How fast the mobile payment market segment grows, however, will…
Let me see if I’ve got this right…
Christopher Furlong/Pool/Reuters
Dear Prime Minister Cameron, You recently proposed that all internet apps – and their users’ communications – be compelled to make themselves accessible to state authorities. I want to explain why this…
Time exposed photo of the Auroral Spatial Structures Probe Launch into the aurora.
Merrick Peirce
The aurora borealis lights up the Arctic night skies. Also called the Northern Lights, the phenomenon is the result of beams of charged particles tracing along the Earth’s magnetic field and entering the…
Distraught Seattle Seahawks fans after their team lost the Super Bowl.
Jason Redmond/Reuters
“The worst call in Super Bowl history,” read a headline in my hometown Seattle Times after Seahawks’ head coach Pete Carroll seemingly threw the game away with his ill-fated decision to pass – rather than…
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2007.
Larry Downing/Reuters
The announcement of the upcoming publication of Go Set a Watchman – a sequel to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird actually written before the famous novel – has, not surprisingly, set off a flurry of…
Literary translation has occurred for centuries (the Bible is a prime example). And with Nobel Prize winners like French author Patrick Modiano, it’s unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Wikimedia Commons
I recently stumbled upon a post that describes the process of literary translation as “soul-crushing.” That’s news to me, and I’ve been engaged in literary translation for the better part of four decades…
Robert McKersie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Black History Month provides an opportunity to pull back the curtain and turn the spotlight on individuals who made a difference in the successes of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. I had the…
Nuclear power plants, like this one in Tennessee, supply almost 20 percent of the electricity in the US.
Nuclear Regulatory Comission
It’s been almost two decades since a new nuclear plant opened for business in the United States. But that’s about to change as construction wraps up on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Watts Bar Unit 2…
Harnessing the quantum property of light takes security to the next level.
Boris Skoric
Decades of data security research have brought us highly reliable, standardized tools for common tasks such as digital signatures and encryption. But hackers are constantly working to crack data security…
Do more non-medical vaccine exemptions mean a higher incidence of disease?
luminaimages/Shutterstock
As of January 30, 102 people in 14 states were reported to have measles, and most of these cases are tied to the outbreak that began at Disneyland in December. Public health officials are citing an increase…
Well-being at work is a prerequisite for flourishing in life. Most of us have some type of employment, if not a full-time job, and we spend the majority of our waking hours engaged in this work. Therefore…
All people have prejudices, but learning more about them could help keep them in check.
Crowd image via www.shutterstock.com.
Humans are highly social creatures. Our brains have evolved to allow us to survive and thrive in complex social environments. Accordingly, the behaviors and emotions that help us navigate our social sphere…
High costs can keep some patients from seeing a doctor until its too late.
VILevi/Shutterstock
The Affordable Care Act has enabled millions of previously uninsured people to obtain health insurance at reasonably low rates and has fixed some of the most vexing – and unfair – peculiarities in the…
Hot off the presses: the CBO plays a pivotal role determining the price tag of measures in the budget and other legislation.
Reuters
Deborah Lucas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Congress created the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) 40 years ago to provide lawmakers with information independent of the influence of the executive branch. The CBO’s most important job…
“Office hours” in the age of online.
Happy Together/Shutterstock
For the past twenty years, I’ve heard this question asked many times about online education. It might be tempting for enthusiasts to say “of course it is good,” but I see this as a kind of “trick question…
Hollywood films have long depicted Arabs in a negative light. Pictured is the movie poster from 1921’s The Sheik.
Wikimedia Commons
The first Iraqis to appear in Clint Eastwood’s Iraq War drama, American Sniper, are a young mother and boy of maybe 12. They are seen from the point of view of the man who will kill them: Chris Kyle, the…
E-cigarettes and other vaping products are on track to out-sell cigarettes by the end of 2023. And more and more young people are trying e-cigarettes. So what do you need to know about them? Are they less…