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 of ingredients. You could even sell your soda and compete with Coke directly. What you couldn’t do, at least not without a team of lawyers 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 bug that makes you feel like your skin is covered in …bugs. It seems I have to get over it, because the inchworms of my 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 in the same essay, even though all three subjects were doing the same thing. The teacher said it was boring, and—typical for the era—implied that 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 the first half of that statement is correct: A hearing aid would only make things worse. We often assume that age-related hearing loss, or presbycusis, 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, superficial, and commonly not supported by scientific evidence.” The research team collected 159 recorded consultations between general practitioners and obese patients living in the United 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 tendency to assess ecosystems based on current and recent factors, which they call shifting baseline syndrome, may prevent us from seeing the big picture. Ecologically 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 moral and social level, there is also concrete evidence showing that broader diversity can make companies more profitable and countries more competitive. In 2019, 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 suggest the story may be even better than that. Human beings have been experimenting with rice for over nine thousand years, breeding it for better 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 association studies performed on Europeans. They found several sites associated with both SLE and severe COVID-19. The two with the tightest relationships were TYK2, which 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 published Tuesday in Nature Communications addresses whether the coronaviral chicken came before or after the egg. Researchers from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine examined Read more…