Right Now

A diverse group of adults and children holding hands, standing on varying levels against a light blue background.

Why America’s Strategy For Reducing Racial Inequality Failed

Harvard professor Christina Cross debunks the myth of the two-parent Black family.

by Saima Sidik

Mechanical engineer Emilie Dressaire

A Durable Bubble

Mechanical engineering student Emilie Dressaire studies tiny bubbles that can last up to a year and replace fat droplets in ice cream.

by Paul Gleason

The slave trade shipped Africans to the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia; where victims ended up depended in part on which trade route their captors used. In total, the four routes ferried nearly 20 million people out of Africa.

Slavery’s Sway

Interdisciplinary economist Nathan Nunn explores the problem of African underdevelopment by drawing on—and unearthing—historical data about slavery.

by Paul Gleason

The Teen Brain

It’s a paradoxical time of development. These are people with very sharp brains, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them...

by Debra Bradley Ruder

Proof Positive

Richard L. Taylor’s work connects two discrete domains of mathematics: curved spaces, from geometry, and modular arithmetic, which has to do with counting...

by Elizabeth Gudrais

This unorthodox de-mining team avoids most of the traditional pitfalls. Metal detectors give too many false alarms, fooled by bullets or other debris. Hand-held ground-penetrating radar machines are too expensive. Dogs weigh enough to trigger mines, injuring or killing themselves and their handlers.

Man, Mongoose, and Machine

Standing outside a Sri Lankan army base in the spring of 2007, Thrishantha Nanayakkara mapped an entire minefield without once setting foot in it.

by Paul Gleason

Daniel Carpenter

Prescription for Error?

In recent years, safety recalls of widely prescribed drugs like the pain-killer Vioxx have sent an unsettling message to consumers.

Tools of Stasi spying: jars containing dust cloths used to capture the body scent of people the Stasi was trying to track; a deer statuette with a camera hidden inside; a Swiss-made Tessina 35-mm miniature camera.

The Seductions of Snooping

Historian of science Kristie Macrakis's book on spying techniques used by communist East Germany's secret police.

by Elizabeth Gudrais

Raiders Rehabilitated

Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner and coauthors offer a revisionist view of corporate raiders and their Gordon Gekko image after reviewing 5,000 buyouts...

by Josh Lerner

One form of the Rocky Mountain monkey flower has a long trumpet suited to pollination by hummingbirds; the other is pollinated by bumblebees. Their hybrid offspring don’t do well in the wild, however, because they are not easily fertilized by the birds or the bees.

What Stress Reveals

Biologist Susan Lindquist investigates how HSP90 (heat-shock protein 90), a protein chaperone, provides a molecular mechanism that may help explain punctuated equilibrium in evolution...

by Jonathan Shaw

The younger brain, below, shows more synchronized activity than the older brain, above.

The Aging Brain

Looking at the effects of aging on healthy people's brains...