With the current concern about the security risks of immigrants and refugees, this is a good time to remind everyone that episodes of xenophobia (fear of foreigners) have happened periodically throughout our history. One example — when I was visiting Boston in April, I learned about NINA. It’s an acronym that means “No Irish Need
Have you ever heard of Henrietta Lacks? In many respects, she was an ordinary woman. Born on August 1, 1920, she gave birth to five children, but only lived 31 years. But she had a profound effect on modern science and, at least indirectly, has saved many lives. The remarkable part of her story began
May 26th, 1895 was the birthday of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. She was born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, and is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Her most famous photo was “Migrant Mother” (left) in 1936, but took many more that were just as hauntingly beautiful.
I guess we’re all supposed to read something this summer. I know it’s pretty much a given that high school students will have a summer reading list, but several of the news programs and publications I follow have been coming out with reading lists of their own. They must assume everyone gets a vacation with
This is a story about how an educator thought outside the box. Each year, Katie Martin-Meurer, an art instructor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, saw something that disturbed her. The students in her three-dimensional design course would simply toss their projects into the trash after they had been graded. What a waste! Her first
Families with newborns know babies follow their own schedule. But after a while, about the time a baby starts to smile, a rhythm develops. So babies do develop a sense of time. Research suggests this happens about the one-month mark. For example, in a 1972 study, researchers placed month-old infants in a dark room. A
Human nature never fails to amaze me. I’m sure you’ve all heard of placebos, those fake pills that are used as real drugs in scientific studies. The complication is doctors have been giving placebos to patients as a beneficial treatment for centuries, and their patients usually improve, even though there is no medicinal value. The
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, scientists have discovered something new about snakes. Snakes have a creepy enough reputation. There is something about an animal without limbs and slithers on the ground that elicits a primal fear. And of course there is a word for that — herpetophobia, or fear of reptiles.
On the surface, it’s a real mystery. The nation’s unemployment rate has been below five percent for months, but as of April, 2017, 1.6 million people have been out of work for six months or longer; almost a million of them have been without jobs for a year. Economists call it “long-term unemployment”; they calculate
The oceans are huge, right? Unfortunately, they’re not big enough, because the trash we’ve been dumping into these largest of waterways is becoming a real problem. In fact, there is an area of floating junk that’s become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch ( https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/). Except there is actually more than one. But how