Anthropologist Christine Walley raises questions about how to create and support meaningful work in a postindustrial world. By Elizabeth Svoboda.

Some of us dream about having it all—the perfect house, the fancy cars, all of the money we could ever need. And then some of us don’t have to dream: these individuals, instead, do (or at least appear to) have it all. The aforementioned fortunes, the riches, the privilege. What more could they want or need? It may be hard to believe, but this life of privilege isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—at least not for affluent teens.

Malware in firmware can be both creative and destructive and runs before the OS loads and target components in order to modify or subvert their behavior. By Cassius Puodzius.

Amid a historic spike in U.S. traffic fatalities, federal data on the danger of distracted driving are getting worse.

The top speed of light is very fast: 299,792,458 metres per second. As it passes through transparent materials, like water or glass, it slows slightly. However, scientists think that by slowing light to a much greater degree – making it millions of times slower – they could use it in whole new ways, such as to transmit and store information or to interrogate and control single molecules.

Dogs really do turn on the puppy eyes when humans look at them, according to researchers studying canine facial expressions. Scientists have discovered that dogs produce more facial movements when a human is paying attention to them – including raising their eyebrows, making their eyes appear bigger – than when they are being ignored or presented with a tasty morsel.

A drug to dramatically cut the risk of HIV infection during sex would save the UK around £1bn over the next 80 years, say scientists. The team at University College London says Prep, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, is a "no-brainer" for the NHS. The study predicts that giving Prep to men who have sex with men would prevent one in four HIV cases.

The Mars company has sponsored hundreds of scientific studies to show cocoa is good for you.

French scientists claim they may have found a physiological, and seemingly treatable, cause for dyslexia hidden in tiny light-receptor cells in the human eye. In people with the condition, the cells were arranged in matching patterns in both eyes, which may be to blame for confusing the brain by producing “mirror” images, the co-authors wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Too much exercise can kill you, scientists have revealed. White men who work out at least seven-and-a-half hours a week are nearly twice as likely to suffer from heart disease than those who do a moderate amount, a new study shows. Researchers in Chicago compared 25-year exercise patterns and made the surprising discovery that very active white men are 86 percent more likely to experience a buildup of plaque in the heart arteries by middle age.

Sometimes big data doesn’t solve problems—it magnifies them. By Will Oremus.

Want to teach an old dog new tricks? Try letting your pet take a nap. New research finds that dogs consolidate new memories in sleep, just like humans do. The study used electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that measures electrical activity in the brain via the scalp, to track snoozing dogs' brain activity. Similar to humans, the dogs showed short bursts of activity, called sleep spindles, during non-rapid-eye-movement sleep. Also as in humans, the frequency of these sleep spindles was linked to how well a dog retained new information it had learned before its nap.

Getting blood from a woman who has ever been pregnant could be risky for men, a new study from the Netherlands suggests. The findings are provocative and may, if true, have significant clinical implications, as well as affect the blood donation process and the use of blood in transfusions,

Researchers say the trend is worth watching in other states.

For scientists trying to understand what ancient Mars might have been like, the red planet sends some mixed signals. Water-carved valleys and lakebeds leave little doubt that water once flowed on the surface. But climate models for early Mars suggest average temperatures around the globe stayed well below freezing.

There's a long-known relationship between cancer and sugar, but figuring out exactly how it works has proven elusive. Now, thanks to a nine-year research project, scientists have made a breakthrough.

In 2011, only 49% of Americans believed you could be good without God. That number has since risen to 56%. More than half. That’s not insignificant. And while you’d expect the number to rise as we witness the growth of the “Nones,” these numbers also reflect the changing opinions of religious people who are having a harder time maintaining the lie that religion is what makes somebody moral.

Throughout history, humans have used changes in skin colour to support the idea that people belong to different races, but a new study says it's beyond time to challenge that thinking.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing threat around the world. So some drugmakers are starting to turn to other solutions, including one that’s actually had a fairly long history: phage therapy.

Controversy has erupted over a scientific paper that is being retracted after it was attacked for being 'antivax pseudoscience' and found to contain manipulated, false data… which has now gone mysteriously AWOL. The research, published last month, suggested aluminium contained in vaccine adjuvants could trigger biological responses in mice "consistent with those in autism", but it didn't take long for scientific commentators to tear the paper apart.

Some 40 years since CT scans first revealed abnormalities in the brains of schizophrenia patients, international scientists say the disorder is a systemic disruption to the brain’s entire communication system. The study, published in the Nature journal Molecular Psychiatry on Oct. 17, sets the stage for future research on the debilitating mental illness that, according to the World Health Organization, affects more than 21 million people worldwide.

For the first time, scientists observed a cosmic phenomenon using both gravitational wave detectors and traditional telescopes, starting a new kind of astrophysics.

How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive.

Keith Calder has found messages from baffled, distressed women whose male romantic partners literally don't wipe their asses because touching themselves between the cheeks might make them gay.

No matter how you raise a wolf, you can’t turn it into a dog. To find out why, scientists have to spend a lot of time cuddling and testing puppies.

University of Guelph researchers have published what is believed to be the first scientific paper in North America on improving medicinal cannabis plant production, helping move the industry into the realm of high-tech laboratories and evidence-based practices. “Growing marijuana has been illegal for so many years that there has been hardly any scientific research up until this point on how to produce this crop,” said Prof. Youbin Zheng. “There has been no science guiding this industry.”

Titan, the largest of Saturn's more than 60 moons, has surprisingly intense rainstorms, according to research by a team of UCLA planetary scientists and geologists. Although the storms are relatively rare—they occur less than once per Titan year, which is 29 and a half Earth years—they occur much more frequently than the scientists expected.

The double-standard for white shooters is more than just "lone wolf"

A probe invented at Rice University that lights up when it binds to a misfolded amyloid beta peptide—the kind suspected of causing Alzheimer's disease—has identified a specific binding site on the protein that could facilitate better drugs to treat the disease.

Planet Nine is out there, and astronomers are determined to find it, according to a new statement from NASA. In fact, mounting evidence suggests it's hard to imagine our solar system without the unseen world. The hypothetical planet is believed to be about 10 times more massive than Earth and located in the dark, outer reaches of the solar system, approximately 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune is. While the mysterious world still has yet to be found, astronomers have discovered a number of strange features of our solar system that are best explained by the presence of a ninth planet, according to the NASA statement.

A prototype valve grows with the patient, so doesn’t need replacing.

Can a fish be depressed? This question has been floating around my head ever since I spent a night in a hotel across from an excruciatingly sad-looking Siamese fighting fish. His name was Bruce Lee, according to a sign beneath his little bowl. There we were trying to enjoy a complimentary bloody mary on the last day of our honeymoon and there was Bruce Lee, totally still, his lower fin grazing the clear faux rocks on the bottom of his home. When he did finally move, just slightly, I got the sense that he would prefer to be dead.

Regulator says Microsoft doesn't offer enough information to enable informed consent.

The doctors who lead the medical profession’s debates on how best to preserve and restore our health are done with moments of silence in the face of gun-related violence. In the wake of a mass shooting that killed 59 people and wounded hundreds more in Las Vegas, they neither minced words nor observed political niceties in describing the threat that firearms pose to Americans’ health.

Ever since the EM drive first made headlines , science lovers have puzzled over how the propulsion system seems to produce thrust , despite the fact it's 'impossible' according to one of the most fundamental laws of physics - Newton's third law of...