Watch the "The incredible story of the boy who invented braille" video at BBC Ideas. Explore other related content via our curated "Eponyms explored" playlist.

Roughly two out of every three arrests by state and local law enforcement target small-time offenders who are carrying less than a gram of illegal drugs.

A simple measure of societal progress is: “Will the next generation be better off than the current one.” Right now, we seem to be going backwards on that metric. A child born today has around the same chance of growing up in poverty as one born in 1990.

A former Texas pastor who supported legislation that would have criminalized abortions in the state has been arrested on charges of child sex abuse. Stephen Bratton is accused of having “sexual intercourse multiple times a day or several times a week” with a teenage relative, over the course of two years, according to court records.

arlier this month, the author and screenwriter Gareth Roberts announced that his story was being removed from a forthcoming Doctor Who anthology. Having been shown Roberts’s past tweets about transgender people, BBC Books said that his views “conflict with our values as a publisher”. At least one of the book’s other contributors, Susie Day, had promised to withdraw from the project if Roberts were included. “I raised my concerns, and said if he was in, I was out,” Day said.

Look down at your feet. Your shoes might seem an innocuous, but they contain lots of forms of plastic, and often leather, giving them their own sizeable carbon footprint. As all companies try to limit their plastic use, shoe manufacturers are trying to design new shoes with lower embedded emissions. Canadian shoe company Native Shoes is doing it by making a shoe that’s entirely biodegradable, because every component is made from plant material.

Faced with growing calls for action on the climate crisis, aerospace companies gathering for the Paris air show next week are turning their thoughts to a future run on electricity rather than fossil fuels. The scale of the challenge is considerable. The target for net zero carbon emissions by 2050, recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and embraced by the UK this week, coincides with the expectation that the number of flights will double in the next 20 years.

The case for action to tackle the climate emergency, on a scale far beyond anything that has yet been attempted, is increasingly widely understood. Almost three decades after the first UN climate treaty was agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and despite the commitments thrashed out among nation states at every summit since, global carbon emissions last year rose to a record 37.1bn tonnes.

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody? At its heart, this is what's called the Fermi Paradox: the perplexing scientific anomaly that despite there being billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy — let alone outside it — we've never encountered any signs of an advanced alien civilization, and why not?

Hong Kongers have long lived a freer lifestyle than most Chinese. That might change

The social network tells the group it was kicked off for spreading "harmful misinformation."

A simple tweak to the sleeping patterns of ‘night owls’ – people with extreme late sleeping and waking habits – could lead to significant improvements in sleep/wake timings, improved performance in the mornings, better eating habits and a decrease in depression and stress.

Passengers will be able to watch 4K video or play video games.

Heartfelt handwritten lines from the war poet ‘fell into the lap’ of researcher who was trawling through theatre director’s letters

Jon Stewart on Tuesday torched lawmakers in emotional testimony for failing to attend a September 11th Victim Compensation Fund hearing, calling it "shameful" and "a stain on this institution."

Elon Musk revealed that Tesla has a design for an electric submarine or amphibious car, but it doesn’t sound like it’s something that they plan on bringing to market. The 1977 James Bond movie ‘The Spy Who Loved Me‘ featured a modified Lotus Esprit that could change into a submarine.

Owning nothing is now a luxury, thanks to a number of subscription start-ups.

Meditation and vacations appear to have overlapping effects, according to new research in The Journal of Positive Psychology. The study found that both ...

Honeybees can learn to associate symbols with specific numerical values, and vice versa.

George Orwell meant his novel to be a warning, not a prediction—and that warning is relevant in new and unsettling ways.

Illegal cannabis storefronts have persisted in Toronto despite raids and attempts to bar the store's entryways using other means, including steel doors. Now, there's a new weapon in the city's battle against illegal dispensaries: giant cement blocks. 

And they’re afraid to speak out about it

And it turns out it's a positive thing

The Agriculture Department is barely enforcing regulations on big meat companies.

As Jay-Z once rapped, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man."