To Solve Hospital Overcrowding, Think Like a Mathematician
Hospitals have often struggled to allocate resources to handle the ebb and flow of patient demand. But studies suggest that patients show up in fairly predictable patterns. The problem is that...
View ArticleFrom Flying Spiders to Global Warming, a Hymn for a Windswept Planet
In the newly reissued "Heaven's Breath," the South African explorer and polymath Lyall Watson blends science, folklore, history, and anecdote to explore the many wonders of wind, a primal force that he...
View ArticlePlanned Parenthood Withdraws From Federal Funding Program Over Abortion...
Planned Parenthood announced this week that it would withdraw from a federal family planning program rather than comply with restrictions that would limit its providers’ ability to counsel women on...
View ArticleThe Problem With MRIs for Low Back Pain
Over two decades, the use of magnetic resonance imaging and other high-tech scans for low back pain increased by 50 percent in developed countries. Medical societies have launched campaigns to convince...
View ArticleFeral Hogs Are a Serious Threat to North American Biodiversity
After monitoring 36 forest patches in Mississippi, researchers found that forest patches with feral pigs had 26 percent less-diverse mammal and bird communities than similar forest patches without...
View ArticleA New Japanese Stem Cell Treatment Raises Hopes — And Ethical Questions
Stemirac is arguably the world’s most ambitious approved stem cell treatment and should have been a cause for celebration: a long-awaited breakthrough using modern biological tools to repair the body...
View ArticleTo Justify Using Weed, Pregnant Women Cling to an Old and Dubious Study
Twenty-five years ago, a graduate student published a study on cannabis use in pregnancy in rural Jamaica. One of her findings — that infants exposed to the drug did just fine — is widely cited on...
View ArticleBabies, Chiropractors, and the Curse of Wishful Thinking
In the U.S., chiropractors are currently free to treat infants, and many do. Proponents argue that back manipulations are harmless and can help with everything from colic to constipation. But while the...
View ArticleWith Elephant Ivory Banned, a Brisk and Worrying Trade in Mammoth Tusks
Amid fears that elephant ivory is being laundered through the booming trade in woolly mammoth ivory, some conservationists are pushing to regulate trade of mammoth tusks as though they were products...
View ArticleScientists at MIT, Harvard, and Elsewhere Face Continued Fallout Over Epstein...
Scientists and their institutions faced mounting criticism this week as the extent of their connections to (and funding from) convicted pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continued to...
View ArticleDiversifying Peer Review by Adding Junior Scientists
Advocates say employing more early-career researchers — from scientists in the final years of their Ph.D. to young principal investigators — in peer review could help diversify and improve science. In...
View ArticleThe Amazon Fires Are Alarming, But They Won’t Bankrupt Earth’s Oxygen Supply
There are many reasons to protect tropical rainforests: They harbor species found nowhere else and contain enormous stores of carbon that would otherwise contribute to the climate crisis. But the...
View ArticleAre We Overestimating How Much Trees Will Help Fight Climate Change?
Forests play an important role in helping to offset global warming by storing carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide, but new research using imaging techniques to look inside of trees suggests that...
View ArticleIt’s Time to Get Tough on Overseas Drug Manufacturers
Given President Trump’s boasts about being tough on China, one might imagine that regulators of Chinese drug manufacturing plants would be in a hawkish state of vigilance. Yet in my decade...
View ArticleThe Myth of the Male and Female Brain: Five Questions for Gina Rippon
The author of “Gender and Our Brains" argues that there is no such thing as a male or female brain, that neuroimages are often misinterpreted, and that external factors like gender stereotypes and...
View ArticleAs Hurricane Dorian Wreaks Havoc, Scientists Discuss Climate Change Connection
Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Bahamas on Sunday, bringing what the country’s prime minister called “generational devastation” to Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands. While such extreme weather...
View ArticleHow Bullying May Shape Adolescent Brains
In a recent study looking at adolescent brain development and mental health, neuroimaging showed youth who have experienced chronic bullying tended to have larger losses in the volume of certain brain...
View ArticleClimate Change Is Driving People Out of Central America
Both rapid-onset and long-term environmental crises continue to displace people from their homes in Central America. Displacement often happens indirectly through the impact of climate change on...
View ArticleCan a New Diagnosis Help Prevent Suicide?
In the public imagination, suicide is understood as the end of a tortuous decline caused by depression or another mental illness. But clinicians say suicidal crises can come rapidly, escalating from...
View ArticleCan Physicists Rewrite the Origin Story of the Universe?
Cosmologists like Roger Penrose are on a quest to challenge an established dogma: that the universe began with a burst of rapid inflation. But in physics, he and others worry, the quest to unravel the...
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