If you happened to get your hands on a copy for the recipe to Coca-Cola, you could brew up as much of the fizzy stuff as you wanted and there wouldn’t be anything the Coca-Cola Company could do. This is because United States copyright laws don’t cover recipes or lists Read more…
If you’re anything like me, you can’t. Stand. Bugs. Maybe not all bugs. A delicate spider is a fellow fiber artist (and it eats other bugs). A beetle with its elegant elytra is a complement to any garden (and it eats other bugs). But perhaps there’s that one kind of Read more…
Academic writing in the hard sciences values clarity over poetry, even in contexts in which most other forms of English writing do not. This means that not all common writing advice applies. A middle school teacher once told a young me not to use the same verb in three sentences Read more…
“I don’t need a hearing aid. Just speak clearly!” Most of us have heard some version of it, usually but not necessarily from an older relative who just asked us to repeat something that they didn’t quite parse the first time. According to research from Johns Hopkins Medicine, at least Read more…
In findings that will surely be stacked right next to “Yes, chicken soup is good for you,” findings published in Family Practice show that doctors often give obese patients very general, very ineffective advice about losing weight. The study notes that available information, even in scientific literature, is often “vague, Read more…
In findings published today in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, scientists from the California Academy of Sciences describe how one unassuming undulator, the Stellar’s sea cow, affected the kelp forests ringing North America’s Pacific coast before European visitors hunted it to extinction in the 1760s. According to the authors, our Read more…
Since its founding in the 1700s, the United States’ ride toward racial, ethnic and gender equality has been as bumpy as the rest of its history. While most people can accept that giving everyone an equal chance to reach their potential is the best thing to do on a Read more…
The world’s farmers are now free to purchase and grow a new type of rice—a perennial. The strain, called PR23, is the culmination of over fifteen years of work. Unlike annual strains, perennial plants do not have to be replanted every year. But findings published this week in Nature Sustainability Read more…
In findings published Thursday in PLOS Genetics, researchers from King’s College London report a mysterious new balance between wolf and bug: A gene associated with increased risk of the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) may protect carriers from severe COVID-19. The research team performed a meta-analysis of three genome-wide Read more…
COVID-19 may have an impact on some key players in human health and disease prevention—our symbiotic gut bacteria. During the pandemic scientists noted the correlation between reduced diversity in the intestinal flora—fewer species of microbes—and more intense cases of COVID-19. But, per the classic warning about correlation and causation, research Read more…