First of all, television is always staged. Everyone knows that sitcoms, dramas and variety shows have scripts and use actors. Some programs include improvisational material, but they are no less staged. Many reality shows are like professional wrestling -- the stars are not professional actors. Producers of these shows are...

Reported by KUNM Radio, EARTH EAR WAVES "Scientists Push to Change the Timing of the Seasons." Reprinted in full.

SANTA FE, NM - Local skiers were festive but disappointed on closing day, a full week earlier than originally planned. As temperatures in the state capital were expected to...

Twenty years ago, a cosmic oddball was photographed by a team of three scientists. The dry language of the announcement in the International Astronomical Union Circular of March 25, 1993 only partially masked the excitement of the discovery:

"It is indeed a unique object, different from any cometary...

Al Capone was Chicago's most notorious gangster. He was ultimately convicted of tax fraud, but that wasn't his worst crime.

Chicago is famous for its mob history. In the early 1910's, goons from the Market Street Gang would beat up newsstand owners who refused to sell the right newspapers. Their...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

When I was a kid, maybe 10 years old, I stayed several days with my grandparents in a house they were renting for the summer in...

Benjamin Franklin, the first American Ambassador to France, was both a statesman and a scientist. On September 3, 1783 he co-signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hotel d'York, in which the British acknowledged the American Colonies to be free and independent States, ending the American Revolution.

Franklin's political eye...

How many times have we heard the apocryphal statement about global warming that "the science is settled"? Is the debate really over? It depends on who is doing the debating, and what is supposed to have been settled. There have been many climate-change debates among scientists as well...

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

Sixty five million years ago, the dinosaurs had a bad day. Phil Plait's talk, "How to defend Earth from asteroids," describes how our own species might be able to avoid a repeat performance. Scientists take this threat...

It was one of those picture-perfect late summer afternoons in the Rockies. Forty years ago, on August 10, 1972, I was a teenager on my last real family vacation before starting my senior year in high school. We were camping in Grand Teton National Park. The sun was high and...

One of the barriers to finding solutions to global warming is the insistence of political conservatives and libertarians that their right to burn as much fossil fuel as they want cannot be regulated. Since nobody "owns" the atmosphere, we have always treated it as an open sewer for our tailpipe...