For over a decade, architecture students at Rural Studio, Auburn University’s design-build program in a tiny town in West Alabama, have worked on a nearly impossible problem. How do you design a home that someone living below the poverty line can afford, but that anyone would want–while also providing a living wage for the local... Continue Reading →

Ikea, a popular furniture retail company that’s already made multiple sustainable advances, is removing all single-use plastic from their stores. By 2020, these products will be phased out, both in stores and in their in-store restaurants. The company also announced a flurry of other renewable commitments by 2030. Single-use plastic waste has been an ongoing... Continue Reading →

Want more evidence that America's economy needs more workers? For the first time in at least 20 years, there are now more job openings than there are people looking for work. The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings dropped below one in April for the first time since the Labor Department started collecting data... Continue Reading →

Your blood is like the Cliffs Notes to your health. It can tell a doctor everything from how well your organs are working to whether you need to add more iron to your diet. So it’s no surprise that blood tests are one of the most common diagnostic procedures in the world. And now, researchers... Continue Reading →

Family, friends, and fans of Stephen Hawking gathered in London on Friday to bid farewell to the renowned physicist, who died on March 14 at the age of 76. Hawking was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, near the tombs of fellow British science luminaries Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, an honor commensurate with the... Continue Reading →

As a linguist I dread the question, “what do you do?”, because when I answer “I’m a linguist” the inevitable follow-up question is: “How many languages do you speak?” That, of course, is not the point. While learning languages is a wonderful thing to do, academic linguistics is the scientific study of language. What I... Continue Reading →

The 50-year-old definition of capitalism in the U.S. is due for an update because of income inequality, according to billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones. "Capitalism may need modernizing," the reclusive trader told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Tuesday in a rare interview. "In 1985, 35 percent of nation's wealth was owned by... Continue Reading →

While robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) promise great advances in productivity, mostly they seem to worry people. Commentators talk and write endlessly about how these marvelous technologies will steal jobs from both workers and the managerial class, creating a large unemployed population. If history has anything to say, however, and it does, such fears are not only... Continue Reading →

There’s an artificial intelligence system that can peer into the future and anticipate what you’re about to do. No, we’re not talking about anything like Roko’s Basilisk — it can’t travel through time or take over the world (at least not yet). Instead, fortune-telling AI can only guess what someone will do within the next few minutes.... Continue Reading →

Particles collected from Earth's upper atmosphere, originally deposited by comets, are older than our Solar System, scientists say – and these fine bits of interstellar dust could teach us about how planets and stars form from the very beginning. These cosmic particles have lived through at least 4.6 billion years and travelled across incredible distances,... Continue Reading →