How to Control the Incredible Promise and Profound Power of Gene Drive Technology

Cutting-Edge Genetic Research That Could Lead to Species Extinction Should Be Handled With Care

From ancient soothsayers to Wall Street stock pickers, humans have always yearned to be able to tell the future. The ability, needless to say, has mostly been overstated.

But what if there was a sense in which you really could tell the future? And what if we could also make a particular outcome more likely, even certain? The emerging technology known as gene drives offers just such a prospect for favoring particular traits in future plants and animals—to increase agricultural output, to reduce the risk of infectious disease transmission, or …

How a Refugee from the Nazis Became the Father of Video Games

Ralph Baer's Life Is a Classic Tale of Scrappiness and Perseverance

It’s perhaps fitting that the man recognized as the father of the video game, that quintessential American invention, was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, whose personal story converged with …

Why Can’t We All Fight On Like Old USC?

California's Public Universities Could Learn Some Things From the Rise of the Trojans

The University of Southern California football team is likely to lose to archrival UCLA this Thanksgiving weekend. But away from the gridiron, USC is on a decades-long winning streak that …

Why Big Data Isn’t So Bad

Privacy Issues Aside, Gathering Information Can Help Improve Health, Learning, and Living

Big data gets a bad rap.

While stories show up practically every day about the novel and sometimes surprising ways Internet companies can use the massive amounts of data they …

Did Isaac Newton Need Peer Review?

Scholarly Journals Swear By This Practice of Expert Evaluation. But It’s a New Phenomenon That Isn’t the Only Way To Establish the Facts.

Last month, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a finding that could be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 21st century. BICEP 2, their microwave …