Latest Ideas headlines

22.7 Billion chickens — that’s how many broiler chickens are being raised for food at any given time.

The First Family’s home now features 57 Christmas trees celebrating “America’s Treasure.” Why not a few extra with an environmental theme?

For thousands of years, humans have pondered their own humor. Yet, in 2018, a good joke is still a scientific enigma.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

No wonder more Americans are seeking escape.

A collection of unusual insights from the social sciences.

No, turning out the lights doesn’t make you less afraid of infectious disease.

With that in mind, researchers have developed a prosthetic arm capable of picking up signals from an amputee’s stump and performing a variety of manuevers.

At 3:30 a.m. in Redwood City, Calif., one recent morning, officers in a California Highway Patrol cruiser pulled alongside a Tesla Model S traveling 70 miles per hour — only to observe that the driver was falling asleep, his car apparently set to autopilot.

An off-key holiday crooner.

Before the 1920s, immigrants who came to the United States without permission weren’t treated as criminals. A surge of nativist sentiment brought the law down on these migrants.

Years of war killed millions of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But only an Ebola epidemic prompts international assistance. Why?

A collection of usual insights from the social sciences.

Three of the five studies included many of the same patients, a fact the authors failed to identify.

That’s how long ago Africa’s once-plentiful giant herbivores started going extinct, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

Psychologists have spent the last 100 years trying to standardize the diagnosis of mental illness. But what if we all experience it differently?

Common assumptions about how the working class and the upper class behave are dead wrong. Working-class Americans embrace stronger rules to guide their behavior.

Concussions get a lot of attention. But football inflicts all sorts of life-altering damage on players.

A political scientist asks whether we should really be subsidizing charitable giving by billionaires.

Richard M. Fleming may be a man of many talents, but his record as a scientist has been spotty.

That is the typical length of the hand motion that expert Taiwanese chefs use — over and over again for about two minutes — while tossing fried rice in a hot wok.

This is how far scientists are willing to go to investigate the natural world.

A collection of usual insights from the social sciences.

An analysis of about 54 million of the website’s public family trees finds that the heritability of life span, a hot research topic for decades, is considerably less than widely thought.

Cartoonist Beth Wolfensberger Singer lists emergency strategies for standing out during this college application season.

“We’ve learned that children who are abused have physical and mental health issues during their whole life. Epigenetics, or these marks on DNA, is one hypothesis for how that happens,” said one researcher.

Young adults are the misfits of modern capitalism. It isn’t their fault, and the problem isn’t going away.

The demographics of name change petitioners today suggest a complicated story of race, class, and culture.

Food is going high-tech, and policy needs to catch up with it.

His doctor, he says, has told him that he has the body of a 40-something, and he’d like to have his whole life ahead of him.

The AI anchor looks like an actual Xinhua presenter and will read any text punched into the system. But the voice is a little robotic.

A collection of usual insights from the social sciences.

Learn to love GMOs, and resist efforts to demonize or prohibit them. Genetically modified food sets off alarm bells for purists, but crops designed to last longer or resist disease are increasingly necessary.

These turkeys are the ultimate locally sourced protein. So why aren’t people eating them?

Forcasting our food future isn’t easy. Nonetheless, we can attempt some predictions.

Food waste may be an environmental scourge, but now it’s also big business.

Crazy weather and rocky soil aren’t the only obstacles for commercial produce growers in New England.

We’ve been breeding grain for all the wrong things. A plucky team of rogue geneticists and bakers are on a quest to make your bread taste better.

Terms like “beef” and “chicken” evolved over centuries. When the foodstuffs of tomorrow suddenly emerge from the lab, where will they get their names?

With kosher food as with so many other things, where there is a need, a free market will satisfy it.

The rapid growth of this industry has ignited criticism, consistent with a tendency to conflate food sensitivity with weight-loss fads or dismiss it as a bow to trendiness. The rapid growth of this industry has ignited criticism, consistent with a tendency to conflate food sensitivity with weight-loss fads or dismiss it as a bow to trendiness.

America has undergone a kosher revolution.

The wild turkeys roaming the streets and lawns of Brookline are nasty, even menacing. But Thanksgiving is at hand. These turkeys are the ultimate locally sourced protein. So why aren’t people eating them?

What we call the new powders, isolates, mixes, and drinks of the future might help determine whether they become the powders, isolates, mixes, and drinks of the future.

We didn’t try to fix foods that caused allergies, in large part because we didn’t think we needed to. That might be changing.

In the United States, food waste — some 40 percent of what we produce — sucks $218 billion out of the economy and $1,800 out of the average household’s annual budget.