Portside

Our Planet of the Arthropods is dominated by insects, and when and how insects took over the earth is a question that’s puzzled naturalists for centuries. In an incredible international effort, 100 scientists combined their molecular, computational biology, statistics, paleontology, and taxonomic expertise to uncover some surprising conclusions about when major groups of insects evolved.

Shrinking the financial sector will make us all richer.

Your job contract or cellphone agreement could have secret language that ruins your life. Here's how it works

I think this is a good time for all of us—Tribune included—to stop pretending that Rauner was the nobody from nowhere as depicted in his campaign commercials as opposed to a consummate insider whose firm once made millions managing state pensions funds during Governor Blago's reign.

There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

More than two-thirds of states quickly adopted Common Core in 2010, but four years later, the standards seem to have become, among other things, a proxy for whatever in education people are unhappy with.

According to McClatchy Newspapers, the agency has also been spying on emails from whistle blower officials and Congress, "triggering fears the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistle blower cases."

Although severely concentrated disadvantage remains a predominantly urban phenomenon, suburbs now have nearly as many poor residents in high-poverty neighborhoods as cities. If these communities are ignored, they could become areas of concentrated poverty over time.

American and Russian officials always insist that their smallpox repositories, under WHO oversight, are well guarded. But experience tells us that scientists working in laboratories with the highest biosafety standards are still caught off guard by technical breakdowns, that their staffs make mistakes and break rules, and that a predictable institutional reflex is to cover up blunders.

Telecoms not-so-subtle use of lobbyists and lobby dollars to influence some Civil Rights organizations to oppose net neutrality and the best interest of constituents.