The Present

Information economics suggests that “no news” means somebody is hiding something. But people are bad at noticing that.

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.

As droughts threaten water supplies across the planet, some municipalities aim to utilize an untapped resource: sewage water.

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.

A new study calls the technique “location spoofing.”

Political partisanship might be a treatable condition.

Is working from home the ultimate liberation or the first step toward an even unhappier “new normal”?

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.

A team of scientists managed to install onto a smartphone a spectrometer that’s capable of identifying specific molecules — with cheap parts you can buy online.

There’s a lot to love about the innovations of Scrivener 3 for the Mac.

Companies can identify you from your music preferences, as well as influence and profit from your behavior.

Prep for the most essential cybersecurity exams with over 400 hours of training.

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

Do you sound friendly? Hostile? And which voice would be more likely to buy something?

American universities used to be small centers of rote learning, but three big ideas turned them into intellectual powerhouses.

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

And is anyone protecting children’s data?

The pandemic has many people questioning whether they ever want to go back to the office.

The design of a classic video game yields insights on how to address global poverty.

The world’s 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence.

Global inequality takes many forms, including who has lost the most children

The more you see them, the better you get at spotting the signs.

Fifty years of research on children’s toy preferences shows that kids generally prefer toys oriented toward their own gender.

New research sheds light on the indoctrination process of radical extremist groups.