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Do you know what Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo stands for? The Chinese dissident has praised the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and said China should be fully westernized.
The world system is being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers.
The father of microfinance, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and folk hero Muhammad Yunus, has been accused of misusing development aid — a claim he says is "a total fabrication."
The NYU Economist who famously saw the global financial crisis before it happened shares his methods on how he did it, and what he sees next.
Tests for a specific gene can indicate elevated risk of the disease. But would you really want to know that you may get it?
The Columbia Business School professor thinks the country could be a world leader in solar energy production.
Raising a country from poverty to affluence should make the nation's population happier, right? Wrong, according to a new study of 54 countries worldwide.
Prehistoric humans, along with Neanderthals and Homo antecessor, made meals of each other, suggests new research on human teeth marks found on prehistoric human bones.
There are predictions that, like Latin before it, English must inevitably lose its global dominance. The Guardian's Robert McCrum is not convinced.
Everyone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age, but the purpose and survival value of yawning remain a mystery.
The three most important questions for a nationwide broadband network are: What should the speed be? What will it cost? And how will we pay for it? Craig Settles gives some answers.
Investors’ giddiness over the tech upstarts—and the dozens of other Chinese companies that have gone public in the U.S.—has some wondering whether this boom is really a bubble.
How can we trust a literary guide who, ignorant of the terrain ahead, promises us it will be light and easy? Hillary Kelly objects to Oprah's positivity charged book club.
Our cosmos was "bruised" in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background.
The amiable idea that language shapes thought has become disconnected, in our popular culture, from any consideration of mere fact, says Mark Liberman of the U of Pennsylvania.
Can modern science help us to create heroes? That’s the lofty question behind the Heroic Imagination Project, a new nonprofit started by Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo.
Innovation is built into the American way of life, says former President Jimmy Carter. “Quite often, the people who do leave their own nation and come to an unknown destination, […]
What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two, perhaps caught between principle and pragmatism.
Ices stripped off a long-lost moon may have provided the raw materials for Saturn's rings and inner satellites before the Titan-twin slammed into its mother planet, new research shows.
The U.S. is anxious to broaden its influence in Central Asia—and limit that of Russia. The result, however, are questionable alliances with some of the strangest despots in the world.