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Creating safer communities. Ensuring access to clean water. Tackling such problems requires science. Yet for much of its history, science has been shaped by European values. White European and American men have largely controlled who asks the questions, how they are studied and what is significant. Many important discoveries and innovations have been made, but many questions have been overlooked or unacknowledged because the experiences of investigators were limited. Pursuing personally relevant research broadens science and makes it more meaningful for us all....

Among the bloodletting boxes, ether inhalers, kangaroo-tendon sutures and other artifacts stored at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis are hundreds of scuffed-up canning jars full of dingy yellow liquid and chunks of human brains. Until the late 1960s the museum was the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The bits of brain in the jars were collected during patient autopsies performed between 1896 and 1938....

No doubt you’ve heard about the novel coronavirus variants that are evolving around the world. There now appear to be more than a dozen versions of SARS-CoV-2, which are of varying degrees of concern because some are linked to increased infectivity and lethality while others are not. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by this diversity and to fear that we’ll never achieve herd immunity. Yet evidence is growing that these variants share similar combinations of mutations....

January 1967 Lie-Detecting Hucksters “In the past few years both the methods of ‘lie detection’ and the polygraph itself have been subjected to increasingly critical scrutiny. Although the polygraph was developed as an aid in police work, enterprising practitioners have long since discovered new applications for the device, and since about 1950 the polygraph has become firmly established in industry and government. There are some 500 commercial polygraph firms. Many companies retain polygraph examiners not only to investigate specific losses but also to conduct routine preemployment interviews in an attempt to identify applicants with a criminal record, alcoholics, homosexuals or people who are likely to be disloyal to the company....

Biopsies, although invasive and unpleasant, are typically the best way to diagnose the health of human tissue, especially the liver. A group of researchers and physicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is hoping to change this through a relatively new approach known as magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), which they developed to measure the stiffness or elasticity of tissue and organs without the need for a scalpel. Through MRE, a device placed on the body near the tissue being tested uses vibration to generate low frequency sound waves that pass through organs that have varying degrees of elasticity....

Wallabies are kicking over scientific conventions surrounding mammalian placentas, the organ responsible for protecting and nourishing a developing fetus. A study1 finds that contrary to what scientists thought previously, mother tammar wallabies (Macropus eugenii) have both a functioning internal placenta and milk that performs some of the organ’s usual roles. Taxonomists usually separate marsupials — including kangaroos, wallabies and wombats — from placental mammals, also known as eutherians, such as mice and people....

More new human cases of monkeypox have been identified worldwide, with dozens reported in the U.K. alone. The increase comes after previous evidence had suggested there was unknown transmission of the monkeypox virus within the country’s population, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Monkeypox is thought to originate in rodents in Central and West Africa, and it has repeatedly jumped to humans. Cases outside Africa are rare and have so far been traced to infected travelers or imported animals....

A new study challenges the idea that rich cities must always churn out more carbon. Two urban planners and an engineer assessed the carbon emissions of more than 100 cities in 33 countries, with emissions ranging from 0.08 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to 29.8 metric tons. The study challenges a common argument in the climate policy world: Efficiency must come at the expense of quality of life. Well-governed cities can have much-reduced greenhouse gas emissions," said David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow at the United Kingdom-based International Institute for Environment and Development, one of the publishers of the study....

An anodyne and restrained Theodore Twombly falls in love with Samantha, the female persona of his computer operating system, in the recent movie Her. The romance begins as they overcome their somewhat awkward initial encounter and settle into an easygoing relationship. She arranges his life and tries to fix him up with a date. He tells her about his dreams. They banter, bond over his ongoing divorce and have endless conversations about people, events and desires as they explore the Los Angeles of the near future....

The ‘selfish brain’ theory of evolution describes our brains as taking the energy it needs, typically in the form of glucose, before doling out what remains to the rest of the body. In other words, the brain selfishly prioritizes its own needs which are comparably high. A recent study from the University of Cambridge put this theory to the test by challenging elite rowers to perform a memory task and a physical rowing task, first separately and then at the same time....

Thirty million kilometers away, trailing the pale blue dot that is Earth as it orbits the sun, is a spacecraft designed to find some of the countless other pale blue dots that may speckle the galaxy. NASA launched this spacecraft, known as Kepler, in 2009 to take a census of Earth-like planets in the hopes of figuring out how common—or how rare—are the conditions under which life has thrived here....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Overuse of antibiotics in animal feed is making it harder for doctors to treat life-threatening infections in young children, a report from U.S. pediatricians warns. The report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says the widespread practice of giving antibiotics to healthy livestock to promote growth and prevent disease among animals is making the drugs ineffective when they are needed to treat infections in people....

The first question I got from several readers, colleagues, and friends yesterday was “so which iPad should I buy?” Many were very smart people who keep up with the ins and outs of technology, which leads me to believe that Apple’s new lineup might leave some consumers scratching their heads when faced with a potential purchase this holiday. Related stories Why would anybody buy a 16GB iPad 2 for $399? CNET first look at iPad Air li> CNET first look at iPad Mini with Retina Display The iPad Air’s Missed Opportunity...

The past few years have illustrated the startling speed with which medicine can evolve. Since 2018, the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has approved first-of-their-kind drugs based on RNA, gene therapy, and cancer-killing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells and signed off on human trials to explore the clinical use of CRISPR-mediated genome editing. And throughout this process, the US Pharmacopeia (USP) has been working in the background to ensure that quality standards are in place for new medical products reaching the market....

For decades, Judy Hoy has run an independent wildlife rehabilitation center from her Montana home, where she also previously performed autopsies on deer struck by cars. In the late 1990s she noticed a bizarre trend: Many deer had pronounced overbites, enlarged right heart ventricles, and damaged or missing thymus glands and scrota. And the deer were not alone. “We were seeing those same birth defects on all of the big game and domestic animals,” says Hoy, who reported her observations in 2002 in the Journal of Environmental Biology....

In the messy, chaotic atmosphere of our planet meanders the jet stream, a wiggly belt of air circling the mid-latitudes. As the belt moves south, it pulls cool air from the Arctic toward the tropics. Then it switches direction, pulling warm air from the tropics toward the poles. Sometimes, in response to natural climate patterns, the jet stream becomes abnormally wavy. Such amplified waves have coincided with heat and cold waves, droughts and flooding across the world, according to a study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change....

On February 15, 2013, people near Chelyabinsk, Russia felt the ground shake, smelled the sour stench of sulfur, heard windows shatter into sprays of glass and had to look away from a fireball in the sky so bright it hurt their eyes. The meteor that caused all this havoc largely dissolved into a cloud of dust during its passage through Earth’s atmosphere, so scientists are turning to clues on the ground and the memories of eyewitnesses to piece together what happened that day....

Chinese science is on the rise: the country is now the third-largest producer of research articles, behind only the European Union (EU) bloc and the United States. China’s output has surged during the past decade, according to a report released today by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The number of papers authored by Chinese scientists grew an average of more than 15% annually between 2001 and 2011, rising from 3% of global research article output to 11% over the decade — even as production from the combined 28 nations of the EU and the United States declined....

“Fake news” is Donald Trump’s favorite catchphrase. Since the election, it has appeared in some 180 tweets by the President, decrying everything from accusations of sexual assault against him to the Russian collusion investigation to reports that he watches up to eight hours of television a day. Trump may just use “fake news” as a rhetorical device to discredit stories he doesn’t like, but there is evidence that real fake news is a serious problem....

An agreement yesterday among the Interior Department, California and the Department of Defense signals that a new kind of renewable power is set to emerge: floating offshore wind. The White House announced the plan, which will open parts of California’s deep waters to offshore wind developers. That effectively means a truce in a yearslong turf battle led by the Navy and other branches of the military, which use some of the state’s southern and central waters for training activities (E&E News PM, May 25)....