With graduate school moving online and social distancing in full effect, I have been relying on my phone—specifically, Instagram—to kill time and reignite a sense of community that I lost in the COVID-19 pandemic. As momentary respite against cabin fever, a break from the slew of coronavirus-related news, and a slow reconciliation with my decreased […]
The novel coronavirus is slowly changing the mix of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The most profound changes in carbon dioxide were measured late last month by Columbia University in New York City, where there were 10% reductions in CO2 and a whopping 50% drop in carbon monoxide. “The air is the cleanest I’ve […]
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, access to alcohol will likely become limited due to social-distancing measures mandated by government officials. Some of these necessary public health strategies—shelter-in-place and closing of non-essential businesses—may in turn cause people with alcohol use disorder (AUD) to find themselves in unsafe scenarios. Forward thinking about how to reduce […]
As countries and private companies race to return to the moon, the need to protect the lunar far side—the hemisphere of Earth’s companion that always faces away from our planet—continues to grow. For decades, scientists have argued that the far side’s unique combination of accessibility and isolation makes it vital real estate for a plethora […]
In the weeks to come, we’re about to relearn that old truth: necessity is the mother of invention. Researchers will work around-the-clock because of the world’s need for a cure for COVID-19. But it’s worth keeping a corollary thought in all of our minds: necessity may be the mother of invention, but curiosity and imagination […]
Scientific American April 2020 The naive answer is that white men and scientists are coldly rational—but that’s not the whole story Scientists often complain that people are irrational in their opposition to technologies such as nuclear power and genetically modified (GM) crops. From a statistical perspective, these are very safe, and so (it is argued) […]
In 1985, when I was a baby journalist writing my first college newspaper story, I covered a symposium at Harvard inaugurating the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay (META), a computer system designed by physicist Paul Horowitz to sift through millions of narrow radio channels for signals from other civilizations. Carl Sagan was on hand that weekend to […]
When parents ask, “What grade did you get?” there is a common follow-up question: “So who got the highest grade?” The practice of making such social comparisons is popular in all corners of the world, research shows. Many educators select and publicly announce the “best student” in a class or school. Adults praise children for […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has a lot of people stuck at home with their cats. Which raises some obvious questions: can cats catch the new coronavirus from their owners? Can cats spread the disease to each other? And can people get infected by their cats? Scientists have been so busy studying human-to-human transmission of the virus […]
As the director of a global research organization, I feel obligated to use all the resources of cutting-edge science and technology at our disposal to fight this scourge. As a father, I want a lasting solution, one that serves not just in this crisis, but the next. And, as an American and a Spaniard, with […]