Outstanding researchers present their work and share their opinions in Mapping Ignorance.
The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task. But this is not all that universities can do or should do. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even easier to reduce […]
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials recently in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet. New research shows it is Antarctica that may force a reckoning between the choices countries make today about greenhouse […]
As more and more people around the world are getting vaccinated, one can almost hear the collective sigh of relief. But the next pandemic threat is likely already making its way through the population right now. My research as an infectious disease epidemiologist has found that there is a simple strategy to mitigate emerging outbreaks: […]
Depending on who we consult, we will hear quite a few opinions regarding what it is that motivates assassins. Let us sample some murder mystery writers. Agatha Christie mentions the passions of love, the lust for money, or the pursuit of some fixed idea. Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason detective novels […]
Astronomy • Biology • Microbiology • Physics
Authors: Predrag Slijepcevic, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must […]
Teeth play a central role in the ecology of most vertebrates – for catching prey, processing food and even attracting a mate. It’s no surprise that scientists such as ourselves have long been interested in how teeth first evolved. For many years we regarded shark teeth, with their conveyor belt system of tooth replacement, as […]
By now, we’re all experts in the common symptoms of the oh so omnipresent COVID-19 – say, for example, dry coughing, fever, and loss of smell (Sauer, 2021). While we’re all hyper-vigilant about these symptoms, a new factor behind the spread of this virus may be on the rise: language. That’s right: new research suggests […]
People might once have considered oxygen a human right. But the pandemic has revealed that access to oxygen – in a pure form, for medical use – is a luxury in most low and middle-income countries. Getting access to pure oxygen for medical treatments is a complicated, expensive and often very dangerous business. The current […]
Original: Eduardo Angulo (2017) Preparados para matar: algunas ideas para el debate. Translated and adapted by Julio Nicanor Ozores, M.D. “…the proper application of Darwinian thinking to human issues- of mind, language, knowledge, and ethics, for instance- illuminates them in ways that have always eluded the traditional approaches, recasting ancient problems and pointing to their […]
Scientists have created the world’s first monkey embryos containing human cells in an attempt to investigate how the two types of cell develop alongside each other. The embryos, which were derived from a macaque and then injected with human stem cells in the lab, were allowed to grow for 20 days before being destroyed. We […]
