Current Events

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.

A new study explores how investors’ behavior is affected by participating in online communities, like Reddit’s WallStreetBets.

A new study suggests that private prisons hold prisoners for a longer period of time, wasting the cost savings that private prisons are supposed to provide over public ones.

The US prison system continues to fail, so why does it still exist?

Counterintuitively, directly combating misinformation online can spread it further. A different approach is needed.

Children with pre-existing mental health issues thrived during the early phase of the pandemic.

The conventional wisdom may be wrong. Consulting Google for information about medical symptoms might not be as counterproductive as commonly thought, new research suggests.

The retraction crisis has morphed into a citation crisis.

What’s to blame for the recent uptick in containership accidents?

For some philosophers, hope is a second-rate way of relating to reality.

People may be more willing to get vaccinated when told how popular it is.

Ultrasound might be able to damage the novel coronavirus in the same way an opera singer’s voice can shatter a wine glass.

Masks are great, but what happens when we try to throw out a billion masks at once?

A psychologist and a doctor of emergency medicine explain.

Cotton mask fibers prove 33 percent more effective at blocking viruses in trials.

One bill hopes to repeal the crime of selling sex and expand social services; the other would legalize the entire sex trade.

Beyond making up 70% of the world’s health workers, women researchers have been at the cutting edge of coronavirus research.

Millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine could be distributed as early as this week.

In May 2018, the city of Paris set an ambition to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

While not the first such minister, the loneliness epidemic in Japan will make this one the hardest working.

The debate over whether or not there is a place for political correctness in modern society is not always black and white.

The study suggests scientists are underestimating the number of animal species that could generate the next novel coronavirus.

A warming Arctic Circle could be responsible for bursts of cold weather in the south.