How Do You See the World? People With Creative Personalities Really Do See the Things Differently
What is it about a creative work such as a painting or piece of music that elicits our awe and admiration? Is it the thrill…
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Antarctica’s “Doomsday” Glacier: Its Collapse Could Trigger Global Floods and Swallow Islands
The massive Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 65cm if it were to completely collapse. And, worryingly,…
COVID-19 Omicron FAQ: Is It a “Super-Variant?” Can It Evade Vaccines? How Transmissible Is It?
Omicron, the first COVID-19 variant to have been upgraded to a variant of concern (VOC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) in a matter of…
Genomic Sequencing: How Researchers Identify COVID-19 Variants Like Delta and Omicron
How do scientists detect new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19? The answer is a process called DNA sequencing. Researchers sequence DNA to determine…
Colorful Sweets Look Tasty, but Synthetic Dyes May Pose Health Risks Such As DNA Damage and Cancer
Early-onset colorectal cancer incidence among the young, defined as those under age 50, has been rising globally since the early 1990s. Rates for colon and…
Preventing Future Pandemics Starts With Recognizing the Tremendous Threats to Global Health From Zoonotic Diseases
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that zoonotic diseases – infections that pass from animals to humans – can present tremendous threats to global health. More…
How Effective Are COVID Vaccines Against the Omicron Variant? An Epidemiologist Explains
The pandemic has brought many tricky terms and ideas from epidemiology into everyone’s lives. Two particularly complicated concepts are vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. These are…
Tornadoes and Climate Change: What a Warming World Means for Deadly Twisters and the Storms That Spawn Them
The deadly tornado outbreak that tore through communities from Arkansas to Illinois on the night of December 10-11, 2021, was so unusual in its duration…
Why Is Poop Brown? A Doctor Explains
Three-quarters of your poop consists of water and most of the rest is food your body didn’t digest. Once it exits the digestive system, poop…
Is COVID-19 Here To Stay? Biologists Explain What It Means for a Virus To Become Endemic
Now that kids ages 5 to 11 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination and the number of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. is rising, many…
Rapidly Adjusting Moderna and Pfizer mRNA COVID Vaccines: How Scientists Can Update Coronavirus Vaccines for Omicron
If the omicron variant of the coronavirus is different enough from the original variant, it’s possible that existing vaccines won’t be as effective as they…
Why Moderna Won’t Share COVID-19 Vaccine Patent Rights With the U.S. Government, Which Paid for Its Development
A quiet months-long legal fight between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna over COVID-19 vaccine patents recently burst into public view. The…
Thinking About Quitting Your Job and Joining the “Great Resignation?” Here’s What an Employment Lawyer Advises
Record numbers of Americans have quit their jobs in recent months, with more than 4.4 million submitting their resignation in September alone. Millions more may…
COVID Omicron Variant: How Did It Emerge and Is It More Contagious Than Delta? A Virus Evolution Expert Explains
A new variant named omicron (B.1.1.529) was reported by researchers in South Africa on November 24, 2021, and designated a “variant of concern” by the…
The US Biofuel Mandate Helps Farmers, but Harms the Environment
If you’ve pumped gas at a U.S. service station over the past decade, you’ve put biofuel in your tank. Thanks to the federal Renewable Fuel…
Pythagoras’ Revenge: Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the Physical World Is Made Of
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in…
Crystal Clues: Earth’s Early Magma Oceans Detected in 3.7 Billion Year-Old Greenland Rocks
Earth hasn’t always been a blue and green oasis of life in an otherwise inhospitable solar system. During our planet’s first 50 million years, around…
“Dancing Ghosts” – A New, Deeper Scan of the Sky Throws Up Big Surprises for Astronomers
Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and…
