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Military Metaphors Distort the Reality of COVID-19

In recent weeks, a flurry of headlines about healthcare workers treating people with COVID-19 have utilized a wide array of military metaphors: Doctors are fighting on the frontlines without sufficient ammunition. They are battling the enemy. They are at war. But we are not at war. And we certainly have not enlisted. We are doctors. What […]

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Universe Creates All Elements in the Periodic Table in 10 Minutes

Originally published in July 1948 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Nineteen years after Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the galaxies seem to be running away from one another at fabulously high speeds, the picture presented by the expanding universe theory—which assumes that in its original state all matter was squeezed together in one solid mass of extremely […]

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Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found

The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may […]

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Signs of Modern Human Cognition Were Found in an Indonesian Cave

Imagining things that do not exist in nature and weaving them into narratives are unique signatures of the human psyche. These abilities are abundantly evident in the earliest example of narrative art, which was recently discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In these newly reported images, one or more Pleistocene-epoch humans […]

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COVID-19 Could Help Solve Climate Riddles

As the world scrambles to contain the spread of COVID-19, many economic activities have ground to a halt, leading to marked reductions in air pollution. And with the skies clearing, researchers are getting an unprecedented chance to help answer one of climate science’s thorniest open questions: the impact of atmospheric aerosols. What they learn could […]

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Are Crowded Cities the Reason for the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Is density really the driver of this epidemic or is the idea misplaced? When people are packed tightly into urban areas they come in contact more often, and thus have more opportunities to spread disease. This intuition coincides with our standard understanding of the spread of infectious disease—but only partly. To understand how widely and […]