This month, we’re starting a new series delving into snapshots of science history and their lasting impact on the modern world. In honor of Juneteenth, we’ll start with the Tuskegee Syphilis Study—a clinical study that contributed greatly to the erosion of trust between the healthcare industry and the Black community. This broken trust has had a lasting negative effect on the health of Black people and on the diversity of clinical trials. Diverse clinical trials are crucial to ensuring that new treatments are effective and safe for all the populations they are used in. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black people…
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Power: on Earth, we tend to take it for granted. Most of your household power is generated from the burning of fossil fuels—coal and natural gas account for roughly 61 percent of US power. Another 20 percent is generated in nuclear power plants. These resources are nonrenewable—experts estimate that we may have 50–100 years of fossil fuels and over 200 years of natural uranium left—but Earth also has access to a treasure trove of renewable energy sources. In 2019, water, wind, and sun produced enough energy to power over 60 million average American households. No matter where it comes from, accessible energy is plentiful on Earth. But on other planets and in…
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Whether you are curious about science, investigating the sources of a new science story, or researching a new type of treatment your doctor has recommended, knowing how to read and interpret scientific papers is an important skill. Unfortunately, science papers are often dense, full of scientific jargon, and illustrated with figures that are easy to misinterpret. Today, as science and health issues become more and more present in our daily lives, it is even more important that everyone has the tools and capabilities to interpret scientific research. Below is a step-by-step guide to reading (and understanding) science papers. 1. Familiarize…
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In the early 1900s, scientists were just beginning to understand the diversity and importance of steroids—a group of molecules made in the body that includes the sex hormones (progesterone, estrogens, and testosterone) and the hormones involved in promoting inflammation (cortisol). In addition to natural hormones, steroids can also be used as therapeutic drugs. But at the time, steroids had to be isolated from animal sources to be used as drugs, which was an expensive and low-yield process. During his career as a chemist, Percy Julian discovered a method for synthesizing these unique molecules from abundant plant sources, like soybeans, enabling…
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Viruses have been getting a lot of publicity recently with the rise of COVID-19 and its subsequent variants. But what actually is a virus? And how do viruses differ from other forms of pathogens? Recently, the rise of flu season has led to further questions about the differences between COVID-19 and influenza and how they can overlap. The term virus is broad and dynamic, encompassing a wide variety of pathogenic microorganisms that replicate inside living cells. Pretty much every type of living organism is a victim of viral infection to some extent. And viruses have left an indelible mark on…
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In 1951, two years before the double-helical structure of DNA was discovered, Barbara McClintock gave a lecture on her newest research into maize genetics, which revealed something truly surprising—certain genes were able to jump from one region of the genome to another. These jumping genes appeared to have a pronounced effect on the regions where they landed, disrupting and inactivating nearby genes. In maize (i.e., corn), these effects were easily visualized as changes in the color pattern of kernels over generations. Despite compelling evidence, McClintock’s lecture was met with confusion and open hostility from the scientific community because it conflicted…
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If you celebrated Thanksgiving this week, then you likely spent the holiday eating untold amounts of food. From protein-rich foods, like turkey or ham, to foods rich in complex and simple carbs, like stuffing or sweet potatoes (my personal favorite), and everything in between. In order to get the most out of this feast, your digestive system needs a variety of mechanisms to extract the nutrients you need from a wide range of foods. Because these mechanisms evolved at a time when food was scarce and Thanksgiving-like feasts were a distant pipe dream, your body’s digestion system is remarkably efficient…
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During the American Prohibition, moonshine was responsible for over 750 deaths and more than a hundred thousand cases of blindness or paralysis in New York City alone. Over eighty years later, in early 2019, several outbreaks of toxic alcohol poisoning lead to hundreds of deaths and injuries in northeast India. The culprit in both of these cases was methanol contamination. Chemically, the only real difference between methanol and ethanol is the number of carbons (two in ethanol and one in methanol). Methanol and ethanol taste about the same and produce about the same initial intoxicating effect. The only difference is…
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From vampire bacteria and glowing bacteria to magnetic bacteria and electric bacteria, microbes have developed some strange attributes over billions of years of evolution. That’s not even counting the entire class of microbes known as archaea that evolved to survive in some of Earth’s most hostile environments. This week, we’ll be discussing just a fraction of these strange microbes and the unique environments where they thrive. There are strange microbes in all three of the major domains of life: eukaryotes—the domain of humans, plants, and animals—bacteria, and archaea. The term archaea was first used in the late 1970s to describe…
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Over the past couple of months, the resurgence of Covid-19 cases has been disappointing, to say the least. Just as we were gaining ground in the battle against this virus, it launched a brutal counterattack—the Delta variant. Covid-19 isn’t the first virus to employ this sort of adaptable retaliation survival strategy. In fact, quick mutation and evolution is a viral mainstay—one that enabled viruses to persist and become the most prevalent “organism” on Earth. But how does something that is essentially just some DNA wrapped in a protein shell evolve and change its strategy quickly enough to throw even 21st…
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