Radioactive Real Estate: Finding a Forever Home for Nuclear Waste
America’s radioactive waste from nuclear weapons work gets buried deep in salt deposits in southern New Mexico. That location was intended as a pilot project, a proof-of-concept. But today, there are...
View ArticleEfforts to Build Climate Resilience Do Not Protect Human Health
Resilience — the measure of the ability to adapt to disruptions — is guiding U.S. federal policy intended to protect people from climate-related health harms. David Introcaso argues that HHS’s...
View ArticleBook Review: Refrigeration and the Many Virtues of the Cold Chain
Nicola Twilley’s “Frostbite ” is a sweeping history of the cold chain that explores how refrigeration has shaped everything over the centuries from the human gut to global economies. And the future of...
View ArticleThe Enigmatic Earthquake Hotspot in America’s Heartland
The USGS earthquake risk map sports a big bull’s eye in the middle of the country, far from the closest plate boundary. Caught in this seismic splash zone are millions of people living across five...
View ArticleIn U.S. Prisons and Jails, Exposure to Extreme Heat Is Increasing
A recent study found that incarcerated people in southern states like Texas and Florida have the greatest exposure to extreme temperatures, yet do not have access to universal air conditioning. Since...
View ArticleWill Burying Biomass Underground Curb Climate Change?
Hundreds of carbon removal startups have popped up over the past few years, but they’ve made little progress so far, and they don’t yet add up to a full-fledged industry. That leads to the inevitable...
View ArticleRecognizing the Role of the Research Coordinator
Research coordinators play an essential role in managing clinical studies for drugs and medical devices. But the job suffers high turnover, with implications for how soon potential therapies reach the...
View ArticleInterview: Should There Be Peer Review After Publication?
As a graduate student, Laura Luebbert uncovered some troubling problems with a series of published research papers on honeybees. After a years’ long effort to document the issues, she and her co-author...
View ArticleHow to Pinpoint the H5N1 Mortality Rate in Humans
Avian flu is reported to kill half the people it infects. But that mortality rate doesn’t factor in mild cases that went undetected. And even less certain is how lethal H5N1 would be if it evolves to...
View ArticleA Hurricane Exposes Houston’s Infrastructure Weaknesses — Again
More than a week after Hurricane Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, more than 100,000 electricity customers still didn’t have have power. And the majority of them were in the Houston...
View ArticleThe Perverse Legacy of Participation in Human Genomic Research
The story of how one person became the majority source of DNA for the Human Genome Project encapsulates 20th-century researchers’ attitudes toward donor consent, says Duke University’s Misha Angrist....
View ArticleLooking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design
Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But a number of experts say it is misleading to frame it as a growing epidemic. That is at odds with the view...
View ArticleBook Review: A Family’s Cancer Ordeal, and a Genetic Enigma
Part memoir, part medical detective story, “A Fatal Inheritance” Lawrence Ingrassia chronicles his family’s legacy of cancer, and the quest to find the culprit.” is Lawrence Ingrassia’s account of his...
View ArticleSchools Launched Anti-Obesity Policies. Experts Say They Failed.
Starting in the 2000s, schools across the country began weighing their students, sometimes even sending home report cards with each student’s body-mass index. Since then, evidence has mounted that the...
View ArticleAmid Shortages, Copycat Weight Loss Drugs Are Used by Millions
While weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro are in an enduring shortage dating back to 2022, compounding pharmacies are allowed to sell their own versions. Though the practice is FDA-authorized,...
View ArticleAre 20,000 Big Cats Caged in the U.S.? Highly Unlikely.
The Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was estimated to cost $3 million to implement between 2022 and 2027, focused on tens and thousands of animals that almost certainly do not exist. The law also...
View ArticleRevisiting the ‘Research Parasite’ Debate in the Age of AI
In this month’s Selective Pressure column, C. Brandon Ogbunu revisits a debate about so-called “research parasites” — scientists who use and reanalyze other people’s data. The large language models...
View ArticleBook Review: You Talking to Me? How Human Language Evolved
In “The Language Puzzle,” Steven Mithen draws on the latest findings from an array of fields, including linguistics, archeology, anthropology, psychology, and genetics, to show how human language...
View ArticleHow the FDA Could Shape the Future of Psychedelics Research
This August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision about whether to approve the psychedelic MDMA for use in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. A negative...
View ArticleIn Texas, ‘Junk Science Law’ Is Not Keeping up With Science
In 2013, Texas passed a pioneering law that allows for new trials in cases with flawed scientific evidence. But in the 10 years after the law went into effect, the state’s highest criminal court has...
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