Virginia Gewin is a freelance reporter in Portland, Oregon. Amid a backdrop of massive cuts in US federal support for scientific research, a new effort — the Science Foundation — launched last week to ...

In recent debates about government funding, certain quirky-sounding research projects — like studying shrimp on treadmills — have grabbed headlines and become easy targets for criticism. Politicians ...

At first glance, some scientific research can seem, well, impractical. When physicists began exploring the strange, subatomic world of quantum mechanics a century ago, they weren't trying to build ...