The U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to claw back US$3.7 billion in grants from industrial demonstration projects may create an unexpected opening for American manufacturing.

Today’s large language models (LLMs) process information across disciplines at unprecedented speed and are challenging higher education to rethink teaching, learning and disciplinary structures.

As AI tools disrupt conventional subject boundaries, educators face a dilemma: some seek to ban these tools, while others are seeking ways to embrace them in the classroom.

Both approaches risk missing a deeper transformation that was predicted 60 years ago by Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan.

More and more people over the age of 50 are taking up physical exercise. Medical associations resoundingly agree that this is a good thing. Physical exercise is not only key to disease prevention, it is also a recommended part of treatment for many illnesses.

However, starting to move at this stage of life requires some care. This is especially true for those who have not previously been physically active, or for people who are overweight or obese.

Lichens on stone, those “still explosions” as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-ares unfairly fall victim to something akin to plant blindness, a known phenomenon and tendency of people to overlook plants, which many of us – when we first encounter lichens – identify them as, even though that’s not what they are at all.

Illegal firearm trafficking is inseparable from the illegal drug trade: Weapons are often bought with drug money, can strengthen cartels and can be traded for drugs.

Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” he’d ever met.