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Our planet is unique for its ability to sustain abundant life. From studies of the rock record, scientists believe life had already emerged on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago and probably much earlier.

In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a…

A growing distrust of expertise is reshaping the terrain of science in the United States.

Generative AI was trained on centuries of art and writing produced by humans.

Businesses are acting fast to adopt agentic AI – artificial intelligence systems that work without human guidance – but have been much slower to put governance in place to oversee them, a new survey shows. That mismatch is a major source of risk in AI adoption. In my view, it’s…

More than a year after a ceasefire nominally ended active fighting, much of southern Lebanon bears the ecological scars of war. Avocado orchards are gone and beehives destroyed. So, too, are the livelihoods they supported. Meanwhile, fields and forests have disappeared under the intense fire caused by white phosphorus shelling.…

The darkness that swept over the Venezuelan capital in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, signaled a profound shift in the nature of modern conflict: the convergence of physical and cyber warfare. While U.S. special operations forces carried out the dramatic seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a far…

Just before Christmas, President Donald Trump fired more than two dozen career ambassadors. The action was unprecedented, providing a clear signal that when it comes to diplomacy, Trump values loyalty above all else.

The question the First Amendment keeps asking, across wars and panics and moral crusades, is whether a democracy can tolerate the possibility of persuasion.