Reading Time: 7 minutes The physics of our universe can be splendidly straightforward at times, even if it takes physicists a while to get there. That’s the current major takeaway from a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on February 15, authored by 17 astronomers in collaboration across nine countries, led by the University of Hawai’i. You’re going to […]
media literacy
Posted inHealth
COVID-19 now haunts flu season: What other long term impacts can we expect?
Reading Time: 11 minutes It’s been a rough few days for anyone following flu season data. While China has eased zero-COVID restrictions in the face of protests, despite currently experiencing a surge in case count (along with Japan), North American hospitals face what the American Medical Association is openly calling a “tripledemic”: a wave of flu, Respiratory Syncytial Virus […]
Posted inScience
Alzheimer’s latest drug and science journalism’s memory problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes In July, the medical community was rocked by a disappointing reminder of science’s weakest link: the humans doing the work. The journal Science had shared that its six-month investigation supported the findings of whistleblower Matthew Schrag, who first noted altered images in a high-impact paper on Alzheimer’s, published in Nature in 2006. That paper is […]
Posted inCritical thinking
The work goes on: 7 post-midterm podcasts for a better democracy
Reading Time: 12 minutes Are you doomscrolling around the ongoing US midterm count? The closeness of many races, the losses on some key issues, and the spectacle-driven politics that a tightly split House of Representatives foretells certainly weigh on the US today. Will results be contested on the grounds that they didn’t yield a massive sweep for one side? […]
Posted inWar and Peace
North Korean missile strikes raise questions about our ‘war games’
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Wednesday, North Korea fired 23 missiles. One landed less than 37 miles from South Korea’s coast. South Korea responded with three air-to-ground missiles along a territory closed to commercial air traffic, and around 100 artillery shells from North Korea entered a military buffer zone. According to the Japanese Coast Guard, another missile landed 16 […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk, Twitter, and the future of online platforms
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Wednesday, October 26, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s offices in San Francisco with a kitchen sink, for a video captioned “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” On Thursday, he made his purchase of the company official with a tweet addressed, “Dear Twitter Advertisers”. In this first message as “Chief Twit”, Musk promised a fruitful […]
Posted inThe Future
Latest greenhouse gas stats show COVID impact and challenges ahead
Reading Time: 4 minutes Brace yourself for some messy science reporting in the days ahead. On October 26, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, a summary of where we stand with atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. WMO pulled no punches with its presser headline, “More bad news for the planet: greenhouse […]
Posted inSocial Media
Kanye’s Parler, Musk’s Twitter, WeChat’s fake news: Our digital crisis deepens
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s been a “pick your poison” week for problems with our information networks: from the world’s richest person using Twitter for complex foreign policy, to a prominent US musician laying claim to a far-right social media platform, to the alarm continuing to sound on US midterm misinformation circulating on poorly regulated China-based chat apps. While […]
Posted inHealth
What’s driving panic around the BQ COVID variants?
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Friday, October 14, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released weekly COVID-19 data with a new breakdown of dominant strains for infections. These included the “sudden” emergence of BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, which had been recorded under BA.5 in earlier data, and were now prominent and rising strains when recorded separately. Together with […]
Posted inBiology
On brain cells, Pong, and a major problem with science journalism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Everything old is new again, in the world of mainstream reporting on scientific progress. That’s why you can be forgiven for déjà vu if you read this week about cells trained to interact in an environment mimicking the video game Pong. Wait a second, you might have told yourself: Didn’t we do this already? And […]