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HYANNIS – The Town of Barnstable recently announced that it has received a $100,000 Digital Equity Grant award through the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative&…

Data from ESA's Cryosat-2 satellite has revealed 85 never-before-seen, active subglacial lakes buried beneath Antarctica's ice — 58% more than were previously known.

Each of our children has chosen a different path, moved at their own pace and, in the process, found themselves, writes Linda Button. And for the first time in 10 years, Button and her partner won't be dropping off a kid at college, but she has advice for those who will.

This back to school season, more districts than ever have cell phone bans in place. Teachers and legislators alike say the restrictions help kids focus in class.

The reign of Æthelstan (924 to 939) has excited a significant amount of study in recent years. In 2004 there was The Age of Athelstan, by Paul Hill. In 2011, Sarah Foot published Æthelstan: The First King of England, and in 2018, Tom Holland released Athelstan: The Making of England. A key theme in these books is the role of Æthelstan as unifier of the kingdom of England.

Æthelstan’s most famous battle, Brunanburh (937) was fought against a coalition of vikings and Celtic-speaking peoples. Brunanburh was seen, perhaps erroneously, to secure the future of a unified England. As a historian of this period, I have argued that the “kings and battles” story of the past often cloaks the longer-term engines of political change.

The latest book to add to this history is The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom by David Woodman, which addresses both themes of English unification and viking politics. It also seeks to provide deeper insights into the personality of King Æthelstan. The result is a highly engaging and informative biography.

Fans have had a special opportunity to get up close to that iconic black dress and gaucho hat, OK Calder pin, denim apron, and Marimekko dress in Georgia O’Keeffe: Making a Life, on view in Santa Fe through November 2, 2025 at the O’Keeffe Museum. After you’ve walked through a somewhat chronological presentation of Ms.…

Whether reading a book or listening to a podcast, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities support comprehension in different ways.

After decades in retreat, Republicans have returned to contest the battleground of America’s elite universities wielding the weapon historically held by their foes: state power. At the heart of this reckoning is the political Right’s realization that higher education is inherently political and that both public and private universities constitute legitimate objects for government intervention. For years, conservatives lamented the state of American higher education and their loss of the universities, holding up the ideal of an apolitical, liberal academy that defied practical and historical reality. Now, the Trump administration has dispensed with this limiting notion and shattered the Left’s presumption of total control over American academia.

Critics claim that the Trump administration’s actions comprise “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” per the words of a letter signed by hundreds of college and university presidents. But the battle for the political control of higher education is hardly unprecedented and in fact is nearly as old as the republic itself.

A new book reveals how political conflict and partisan affiliations were central to shaping higher education in early America. Dartmouth College v. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good, by Adam R. Nelson, chronicles the origins, circumstances, and consequences of the eponymous 1819 Supreme Court decision that divided public and private higher education forever—while enshrining corporations into the Constitution. Far from an aseptic legal statement over constitutional principles, Nelson shows the decision was part of a brawl between two political parties. This dimension is left out of most descriptions of the case, even those I heard as a student at Dartmouth during the 200th anniversary of the decision.

Explore the momentous life of the Duke of Normandy – and later king of England, William the Conqueror – with expert insight from historian David Bates.

The Roman empire was at its height when a deadly disease caused devastation to its population, economy and military prowess. What was the Antonine Plague and should we remember it as the beginning of the end of the Roman empire? We found out more from Professor Colin Elliott...

The world’s best solar telescope snapped unprecedented shots of a solar flare, revealing new details of these mysterious explosions.

Photo credit: Christina.entenmann/Wikimedia Commons A national human ecology curriculum that begins with food education could help address our most pressing crises—from climate change to inequality—by teaching students how to live well and care for one another.

As first AI-led rights advocacy group is founded, industry is divided on whether models are, or can be, sentient

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration has launched a McCarthyite assault on freedom of speech. The government, corporations, and institutions have censured, suspended, and fired workers from Jimmy Kimmel to the Washington Post’s only Black woman columnist Karen Attiah and others in almost every imaginable occupation for telling jokes, making statements, or posting critical comments on social media.

Many of those stories have been covered by journalists, but the book Trouble In Censorville features educators who tell their own stories.

The ruling is a legal victory for Harvard but the White House says it will appeal the decision.

The Trump administration is using decades-old laws, meant to prevent discrimination, to threaten school districts and states with cuts to vital federal funding.

Jessica Winter on President Donald Trump’s announcement to lay off thirteen hundred employees at the D.O.E. and the right’s antipathy to public schooling.

From Boricua College to the New School, we ranked the New York colleges that serve their students—and the ones that serve themselves.

How does soap clean our bodies? – Charlie H., age 8, Stamford, Connecticut

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors discovered something that would clean their bodies and clothes. As the story goes, fat from someone’s meal fell into the leftover ashes of a fire. They were astonished to discover that the blending of fat and ashes formed a material that cleaned things. At the time, it must have seemed like magic.

That’s the legend, anyway. However it happened, the discovery of soap dates back approximately 5,000 years, to the ancient city of Babylon in what was southern Mesopotamia – today, the country of Iraq.

As the centuries passed, people around the world began to use soap to clean the things that got dirty. During the 1600s, soap was a common item in the American colonies, often made at home. In 1791, Nicholas Leblanc, a French chemist, patented the first soapmaking process. Today, the world spends about US$50 billion every year on bath, kitchen and laundry soap.

But although billions of people use soap every day, most of us don’t know how it works. As a professor of chemistry, I can explain the science of soap – and why you should listen to your mom when she tells you to wash up.

The Roman physician Galen coined the term ‘plague’ to describe any quickly spreading fatal disease. Epidemics of all kinds have been described as plagues, but the bubonic plague is a very specific disease that first spread around the world in the 1300s.

The impact of the bubonic plague epidemics of the past still echo across the centuries, reminding us of the devastation that disease can inflict on communities. The Black Death is the name given to the first wave of the plague that swept across Europe in the 1300s.

Plague pandemics hit the world in three waves from the 1300s to the 1900s and killed millions of people. The first wave, called the Black Death in Europe, was from 1347 to 1351. The second wave in the 1500s saw the emergence of a new virulent strain of the disease. The last pandemic at the end of the 1800s spread across Asia and at last gave scientific medicine the opportunity to identify the cause of the disease and its means of transmission.

It’s that time of year when the days get shorter. The air turns crisp. The shadows stretch longer. And school starts.

It’s also that time when yet another pompous business CEO or ed-tech executive with zero classroom experience trots out a puerile essay declaring what’s wrong with education and how to fix it. Their miracle cure? Some shiny, overpriced gadget or a market-driven ideology dressed up as innovation. School boards and college administrators eat it up—not because it actually improves learning—but because it promises to cut costs by swapping out teachers for tech.

Let’s be clear: American education has real problems.

The joyful retrospective Eugenie Shonnard: Breaking the Mold, on view at Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art through September 1, 2025, tells the story of a determined young artist in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn who seized opportunities to follow her dream, learn from the best, forge lifelong friendships, and transform inspirations of the nature and culture…