Oil prices recently hit 100 dollars a barrel, and the days of cheap oil appear to be over. Meanwhile, Starbucks is struggling with plummeting stock prices and falling profits. These facts are intimately connected, illustrating the dangers and opportunities ahead. Our food system, which provides us with massive amounts of...

Normally, I stay away from movies about crack addicts. But Half Nelson is a great movie. If you haven't seen it, you should. It's about a brilliant junior high school history teacher with an unbeatable crack addiction. Daniel Dunne, the addict, splits his time between inspiring his inner-city students with...

All the teeter-totters are gone. They have been pulled from playgrounds across the country, and replaced with damped down versions that are restrained by large springs and bounce gently, never hitting the ground. Most of today's children don't know the great rush of going over the tipping point and swinging...

For any scientist, publishing in Science magazine marks a giant success. It's one of the world's premier scientific journals, and only about 7 percent of submitted manuscripts are accepted. But Dan Donato, a second-year graduate student at Oregon State University's College of Forestry, overcame the odds.

Donato was lead author...