The U.S. spends much more per student than any other country. Yet from the very beginning, American students have generally performed below average compared to other rich countries.
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More than 2.5 billion people around the world lack access to formal financial services. But new mobile banking services in Africa are helping millions of people out of poverty.
Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough already, says Amherst economics professor Richard Wolff.
Whether running for president of the United States or for city council, politicians can count on seeing their words broken into ever smaller and more fragmentary bits.
John Stuart Mill, in his classic defense of liberty, argued that each individual is the best guardian of his or her own interests. But recent research suggests that we can use some help.
Long before “The Situation” and his kind entered the zeitgeist, Andy Warhol filmed his own reality show featuring his personal constellation of “Superstars”—artists, musicians, poets, actors, models, and sometimes just […]
Everyone in Yemen is catching it. Early last week, seven ministers and two deputies resigned their posts so that they could compete in the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for April. […]
So it turns out there are actually three outstanding holiday movies–TRUE GRIT, THE KING’S SPEECH, and THE FIGHTER. True Grit is, as I’ve said, very ambitious and philosophically pretentious. It […]
I have a couple of news briefs for the first Sunday of 2011. First off, as many of you noted, Kizimen in Kamchatka had another explosive eruption over the weekend. […]
After a rocky start, people will come once again to appreciate the idea that compromise and democracy are synonymous.
Companies that specialize in science fiction and futuristic space travel will embrace the commercial space age.
The United States will start to imitate the industrial and strategic trade policies of countries like China, Japan, Korea, Germany, and France. It will also begin to withdraw its overseas troops.
As I wrote in my past blog entry, “The 1000 Genomes Project Will Help Us Understand Genetic Variations,” it initially cost $3 billion to fully sequence all of the 25,000 […]
Government health and retirement programs are on paths that will slowly but inexorably bankrupt us. It is not too late to solve the problem.
The widespread use of biometrics will change how we see our health and fitness and open up new vistas for the health care industry.
The brain-as-computer model of the mind will be replaced by an organic model, in which the brain is embodied—part of a whole, dynamic, living organism.
In the coming years, we’ll see a convergence of new platforms for posing grand challenges and new tools to allow anyone to address these challenges.
As we live longer and fewer of us are needed to provide the essentials of life, how can our society provide a sense of purpose to people’s lives through work?
In 2011, “solid evidence will emerge for some form of life on Mars based upon inferring a biogenic origin for the methane gas in its atmosphere.”
The tax breaks put into place by the 2009 Economic Recovery Act stimulated a sharp rise in news and consumer attention to a range of energy efficiency home improvements, providing […]
The next time you take in a movie, you may be getting a lesson in cutting-edge physics without even knowing it. Many special effects would be impossible without fluid dynamics.
Number one on many scientists’ 2011 to-do list is to find the Higgs boson—a particle so important to science that it’s been dubbed the “God particle.”
The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing. Here are a few suggestions for finding ways to do what you love, and still pay the bills.
While science can improve our lives and cure disease, it can also be used for evil. Here are 25 experiments that destroyed lives, or have the potential to unleash doomsday.
With no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no “black problem” in the United States, says The New Republic, echoing England’s increasingly liberal drugs policies.
From the moment they entered the workforce in the 1960s, baby-boomers began to shape America’s economy and politics. They will do the same as they leave.
“The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to,” say two philosophers who have written a book about the loss of traditional meaning in contemporary secular culture.
A lack of ambition plagues virtually every Western country. The ability to act has become shackled by a profound pessimism that does not exist in developing countries.
The only thing worse than being misperceived by a machine is being expertly perceived by one, says Walter Kirn about software that recommends the author books and movies.
Turning off mobile phones and avoiding the Internet can leave people suffering from symptoms similar to those seen in drug addicts trying to go cold turkey, researchers have found.