The slow pace of America's economic recovery means many states are still hurting financially. As many as 15 states still can't agree on a budget, and that's a problem, because in many states the fiscal year begins next month. Parents are understandably anxious about what this all means for the upcoming school year. And they should be. An analysis released earlier this month by the National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers ...

At this year's Grammys, the five nominees for Album of the Year have something peculiar in common: they were all were mixed or engineered by graduates of Full Sail University. In fact, this year's Grammy-nominated projects were worked on by 74 alums of Full Sail U in total. Full who? Full Sail University, a.k.a. the other FSU, is located in Winter Park, Fla., near Orlando. The for-profit college, which was founded in 1979 and originally located ...

It's just as well that Tullis Onstott doesn't suffer from claustrophobia. During the academic year, the Princeton geoscientist works in an office in the sub-basement of the university's Guyot Hall — a floor some of his colleagues didn't even know existed. Now that school's out, he's headed even deeper. Back in 1998, Onstott made the astonishing discovery that bacteria can thrive in pockets of hot water miles underground — far below the depth at which living organisms ...

Man of the Year On the year's shortest day, 60 years ago, in Gori, near Tiflis, a son was born to a poor, hard-working Georgian cobbler named Vissarion Djugashvili. The boy's pious mother christened him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, mother of Jesus. But names were not to stick very long to this newest subject of the Tsar; he was to answer to Soso, Koba, David, Nijeradze, Chijikov and Ivanovich until at length he acquired the pseudonym of Stalin, ...

On New Year's Day a new California law went into effect that sharply reduces the penalties for possession of marijuana. Now anyone caught with less than an ounce of grass will be given only a traffic ticket-type citation and a possible fine of up to $100.The law demands a peculiar kind of precision from police officers, namely a certainty about how much grass makes an ounce. A Los Angeles importer says he has sold several thousand pocket-size scales from Hong Kong to various police departments. In ...

Bullies can be anywhere, but there's no place they show up more than in schools, and no time more than in September. Once the academic year starts, the complicated social hierarchy of a campus — popular kids, nerdy kids, ADHD kids, nerdy ADHD kids who are popular because they sell Adderall — gets reinvented. But this fall the casual brutality of the schoolyard seems particularly bitter. In the past few weeks, at least three teenage boys — one in Houston, ...

The Latin class you took freshman year may lack real-world usefulness, but researchers think graduates may pick up a different kind of skill in college: stress management. A study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests that highly educated adults handle daily stress better than their less educated counterparts. Researchers interviewed more than 1,000 adults over eight days and found that although college grads experienced a greater number of stressful events

The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there's another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world — an authoritative study released every three years — Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were ...

Randall Wentz works for the University of Wisconsin, vetting scholarship applications. He is a public employee, a union member. He makes $30,000 per year. We are sitting in a Madison, Wis., tavern with five of Randall's friends. All have 6-year-olds; they became friends through their children. All are public employees. Several are computer techies who make $60,000 a year. One is a middle school music teacher. These are educated, decent people, open and friendly in the Wisconsin way. They seem in equal parts flummoxed ...

While the world remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, one frontier of the Cold War remains intact; the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea. There they may be free from the hunter's rifle, but they are not completely free from human contact or immune to the conflict between the two sides. Wild boar that have lost legs to landmines can be seen hobbling out from the forests, and when two gorals face each other ...