Ready or not, back-to-school season is here, and kids will be bringing home more than homework. They’ll be carrying germs, too.These viruses and bacteria will be agents that cause the common cold, influenza, norovirus, COVID-19, strep throat, and more. There’s a reason why boxes of tissues and sanitizing wipes show up on most school supply lists.As a nursing professor with experience in public health promotion, I have spent the past several years helping the public understand how to prevent ...read more

Nearly half of all dementia cases could be delayed or prevented altogether by addressing 14 possible risk factors, including vision loss and high cholesterol.That is the key finding of a new study that we and our colleagues published in the journal The Lancet.Dementia, a rapidly increasing global challenge, affects an estimated 57 million worldwide, and this number is expected to increase to 153 million by 2050 worldwide. Although the prevalence of dementia is on the decline in high-income count ...read more

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there wasn’t much space in academia for female scholars. Certain disciplines, like psychology, were almost exclusively male. Graduate programs didn’t permit women to enroll, and there were few opportunities for women to study psychology and impact the field with their ideas.Margaret Floy Washburn was one of the few women who was able to fight her way into the field. Many psychologists now consider her one of the founding scholars of comparative psych ...read more

Drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics announced on Aug. 9, 2024, that the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve the company’s application for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is the first such decision issued on a psychedelic drug application.Many investors and researchers have been predicting a psychedelics boom, with MDMA being just the first of a number of psychedelics in the drug development pipeline.The FDA’s decision has disappoi ...read more

And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may, with some justification, maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful. At Cambridge University Library, along with all the books, maps, and manuscripts, there’s a child’s drawing that curators have titled “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers.”The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, an ...read more

The years between 662 million years and 700 million years ago — just before and after glaciers left a half-mile thick rock layer — were mysterious. There is little information about the planet's conditions just before the period of the deep freeze, which covered the planet in ice and is sometimes referred to as Snowball Earth.Now, researchers have examined a rock feature showing what life on the planet was like — both before the freeze and after the subsequent thaw. The report in the Journ ...read more

From the first time a curious wolf approached fearful humans and managed to befriend them, dogs have been a big part of the human experience. For over 15,000 years, they’ve been our co-workers and companions. Since then, we've learned a lot about dogs and our relationship to them (as you'll learn if you watch Inside the Mind of a Dog, a new documentary on Netflix that includes research based on citizen science contributions). And yet there’s still so much we don’t know about them! To celeb ...read more

Did all dinosaurs become extinct, killed when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago? Or could a few of them, somehow, have survived that mass extinction event – with their descendants living even today?It is exciting to imagine that gigantic dinosaurs are still rumbling and lumbering around in some remote part of the world. But no evidence of this exists. There are no cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex stomping through the vast woods of Siberia, no Apatosaurus ambling through the Congo rain ...read more

Cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, is a clear, colorless liquid that plays a crucial role in maintaining the health and function of your central nervous system. It cushions the brain and spinal cord, provides nutrients and removes waste products.Despite its importance, problems related to CSF often go unnoticed until something goes wrong.I am a neurologist and headache specialist. In my work treating patients with CSF pressure disorders, I have seen these conditions present in many different ways. Her ...read more

Earth has one of the most interesting weather systems. Its atmosphere is ideal for moving hot and cold air around, and a hydrological cycle allows for precipitation. But throughout our solar system, there are other planets that have more extreme and also fascinating weather patterns worth exploring. 1. MarsMars has weather and in certain ways, it’s similar to that of Earth. For example, it has seasons and it has winds. But in other ways, it’s very different. The orbit of the planet causes t ...read more