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 ...

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 ...

The humble inventions that power our modern world wouldn’t have been possible without decades of support for early-stage research. In December 1947, three physicists at Bell Telephone ...