Imagine going to the store, returning home with three full bags of groceries. You pause before entering your house and toss one of the bags into a garbage can, which is then carted away to a landfill. What a waste of time. That is precisely what we are doing today as a group. Around the…
COVID mortality continues to rise across the United States, mainly among unvaccinated populations, prompting renewed interest in newly developed treatments. Monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapy is one of the most successful treatments available. Patients are given high doses of antibodies specifically tailored to attack SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, as part of this treatment. These…
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Apple is collaborating with UCLA to create new technology that employs face recognition and other behavioral tracking technologies to detect sadness in iPhone users. Apple appears to be contemplating a world where your phone could tell you that your mood has been dismal by using information that…
According to new data, Americans are becoming more accepting of people of all colors, nationalities, and sexual orientations. Nonetheless, discrimination against persons from marginalized groups continues at alarmingly high levels. Two explanations have been presented by scientists to explain this seeming contradiction. According to the distributed discrimination theory, most people—even those with strong egalitarian beliefs—engage…
The drop stones found in tropical rocks were one of the first signs that something unusual had occurred on Earth. Drop stones are pebbles that land on the seafloor with enough power to distort the sediment. However, no drop stones should have been present in these rocks. The most common source is glaciers; ice sheet…
If substantial global warming continues, the North Atlantic jet stream, a fast-moving air current that circles the Northern Hemisphere, may travel northward in the next decades. Changes in rainfall patterns in the midlatitudes, as well as a rise in droughts, heat waves, floods, and other extreme weather events across Europe and the eastern United States,…
Researchers have been progressively gaining fresh and significant insights regarding the impact of COVID-19 on the body and brain while the epidemic has been in the rearview mirror for more than 18 months. These discoveries have raised worries about the coronavirus’s long-term effects on biological processes such as aging. My previous study as a cognitive…
Last semester in my Harvard freshman class, I stated that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, emits largely infrared radiation and has a planet, Proxima b, in the habitable zone around it. “Suppose organisms are crawling on the surface of Proxima b?” I challenged the students. “What might their infrared-sensitive eyes look like?”…
JEDI has become a popular acronym for academic committees and STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) initiatives that address social justice issues. JEDI stands for “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion” in this context. A growing number of prominent institutions and organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, have adopted this acronym…
People are accustomed to communicating with disembodied robotic voices such as Alexa or Siri, and in other circumstances, humans are met with genuine robots attempting to converse with them. Will people trust the bots to instruct them what to do when it happens? The answer is most likely no. Most humans, it appears, still do…