Can plants learn? A surprising academic debate
Author: Kate Giffin
原文作者：凯特·吉芬
Editors: Henry Ertl, Sarah Bassiouni, Sophie Hill and Jennifer Baker
原文编辑：亨利·埃特尔、莎拉·巴西奥尼、苏菲·希尔、詹妮弗·贝克
Translator: Zhiying Yang
中文翻译：杨知颖
Editor: Tao Zhang
中文编辑：张涛
时值1633年，天文学家伽利略·伽利莱由于他的异端思想“地球围绕着太阳公转”而被软禁在家。虽然今天的伽利略被视为现代科学之父之一， 但在当时的罗马天主教会裁决中他被认为是“极其可疑的异端”（即认定其支持异端学说）。
Continue reading “植物会学习吗？一场神奇的学界辩论”Written by: Rachel Wahlberg
Edited by: Olivia Pifer Alge, Austin Shannon, Andrés Rivera Ruiz, and Jennifer Baker
Illustrated by: Hana Paz Harbman
This blog post is part 1 of a multi-piece series on the neuroscientific study of consciousness. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 coming soon!
If I were to walk up to you on the street and ask you if you were conscious, what would you say? My guess is you would answer with a “well, yes?” – and if you’re anything like me, with a nervous laugh added, wondering what sort of conversation you’ve just walked into.
Continue reading “The neuroscientific study of consciousness: How did we get here?”Written and illustrated by: Nia Johnson
Edited by: Sophie Hill, Henry Ertl, Jessica Li, and Jennifer Baker
Have you ever wondered how we are able to feed nearly 8 billion people globally? Presently, agricultural lands make up the world’s largest biome, covering over 1/3 of the ice-free land area. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, these 5 billion hectares of land produce around 550 billion tons of crops annually. This is equivalent in weight to 110,000 Empire State Buildings each year! Agriculture is not only a major source of income for 40% of the world’s population, but it also makes up 30% of GDP in low-income countries. While technological advances and agricultural expansion are projected to keep up with the rising pressures of human population growth (about 10 billion people by 2050), the unintended impacts of modern agriculture have advocacy groups and scientists alike concerned about the long-term consequences.
Continue reading “The Pesticide Paradox: How Modern Agriculture is Both Feeding and Poisoning the World”Written & illustrated by: Mallika Venkatramani
Edited by: Chloe Rybicki-Kler, Sheila Marte, Madison Fitzgerald, and Jennifer Baker
“Why don’t you use your genetics knowledge and do something crazy with our plants?”
A friend asked me this question while volunteering at a community garden a few months ago. When they found out I study genetics, they immediately got inquisitive. Did they think my genetics background meant I could create some sort of plant monster? Coolly, I replied that plant genetics is not my area of expertise.
Continue reading “Genetics: What Jurassic Park doesn’t tell you”Written by: Jennifer Baker
Edited by: Christina Del Greco, Jessica Li, and Andrew Alvarez
Illustrated by: Katie Bonefas
Take a deep breath in … (it’s okay, I’ll wait) … aaaannnnndddd release. Feel better? While breathing deeply is relaxing and has psychological benefits, it also has a fundamental physiological function.
Unless you are reading this atop Mount Everest where gas concentrations deviate from those at sea level (congrats on your successful ascent!), about 21% of the air you just inhaled is oxygen, a vital resource your cells need to survive. This oxygen is used by cells all over your body for chemical processes such as generating energy for cellular functions like building proteins, fixing cell membranes, and repairing DNA.
Continue reading “Elemental damage: When oxygen makes you short of breath”Written and illustrated by: Fa Wang
Edited by: Jennifer Baker, Zechariah Pfaffenberger, Olivia Pifer Alge, & Madeline Barron
Imagine a healthy 50-year-old man had a dry cough that wouldn’t go away. His cough disrupted meetings, interviews, and even prevented him from getting sleep. He visited his doctor, who diagnosed him with a cold and sent him home with antibiotics. Not only did his cough persist, the man also started having an insidious shortness of breath with activity, and occasional severe chest pain. He went back to the doctor, who sent him home with more antibiotics. Months later, his symptoms still were not better, and he started having trouble walking up stairs because he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He went back to the doctor, time after time, for additional tests. After 18 months, he was finally diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease he had never heard of before. He was shocked to realize that he had only 3 to 5 years to live.
Continue reading “IPF: Stubborn Scars in Stiff Lungs”Written by: Kane York
Editors: Sophie Hill, Austin Shannon, and Peijin Han
-“Serotonin”, girl in red
Depression. In the time of a global pandemic, a burning ocean, an increasing wealth gap, and other catastrophes too numerous to mention, what could be more topical? Depression is one of the most common illnesses in the world, affecting more than 322 million people. Despite its prevalence, depression is still not perfectly understood. The common view is that depression is caused by an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, but the current research tells us that the condition is far more complex.
Continue reading “Depression: Physiology to Psychology is Rarely Simple”Written by: Lirong Shi and Manaswini Sarangi
Editor: Sarah Kearns and Alyse Krausz
Introduction
As a scientist working around scientists, we may not realize how much scientific waste we and our colleagues produce every day, just like everyone else who may not pay attention to how much household waste we produce in our kitchen. We are so used to the waste in the lab, and compared to the large garbage bin outside, we might think the small plastic bucket in the lab should be negligible. But that is not true. Accounting for only 0.1% of the population, scientists create approximately 5.5 million tons of plastic waste annually in life science alone, which accounts for approximately 2% of the plastic waste produced worldwide [1]. The large amount of plastic waste wandering around the oceans can disrupt carbon balance, poison fish, and end up on humans’ tables. Through experiments, scientists are attempting to improve everyone’s life while also literally contributing to the detriment of the world.
Continue reading “With experiments, comes waste: Scientific waste and where it ends up”Author: Hayley Beltz.
Editors: Alison Claire Ludzki, Callie Corsa, and Sarah Kearns
Take a moment to remember that you and everyone you know live on a small blue orb hurling itself around a hot ball of hydrogen and helium that pays us no mind. Furthermore, we are only one of eight staggeringly diverse planets within our solar system that have been making this trip for billions of years. These planets range from hot rocks too small to even hold onto an atmosphere to cooler, massive gas giants where a day lasts less than 10 hours. Our solar system is only one of many (billions) and is only a small sample of the set of possible planet types and configurations. When astronomers started to look outside our solar system at nearby stars and the planets that orbit them–known as exoplanets–we began to understand just how strange other worlds can be. Our solar system was unable to prepare us for what we saw first: Hot Jupiters. Continue reading “Hot Jupiters: The OG Exoplanets”
By: Sarah Kearns. Edited by: Srihari Sundar & Whit Froehlich
Online presence and shareability of content are ever-more important in our modern and increasingly digital world, and science and medicine are no exceptions. With published papers still being the standard for disseminating research, journals and publishing companies continue to largely serve as the gatekeepers of scholarly content. Accessibility is a critical component, with journals either labeled as Open Access (OA) or paywalled, the latter implying that readers must pay before being able access the content. The motivation behind OA is that open is better than closed – having access to the complete version of a scholarly paper increases the transparency of research, contributing to a more reliable scientific system. Continue reading “Changing Scholarly Publication Practices: The Open Access Movement”
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