Regardless of how you celebrate end-of-year holidays, food is probably central to your winter festivities. And a trio of spices – cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger – feature in many dishes and drinks and are an unmistakable part of the scent profile we associate with the holiday season.As a plant scientist, I was curious to know how these spices, grown in the tropics, became so closely associated with the Northern Hemisphere’s winter holidays. Just as cranberries’ fall harvest makes them a ...read more

When middle school math teachers completed an online professional development program that uses artificial intelligence to improve their math knowledge and teaching skills, their students’ math performance improved.My colleagues and I developed this online professional development program, which relies on a virtual facilitator that can – among other things – present problems to the teacher around teaching math and provide feedback on the teacher’s answers.Our goal was to enhance teachers ...read more

The sore throat. The packed and painful sinuses. The fatigue. Sure, it’s “just a cold,” but it can feel miserable. And after several days, one can easily wonder when they can expect to feel better.Scientists are still learning about colds and how they impact the body. One thing researchers know for sure — symptoms can last the better part of a month. If it seems like someone in the household is always sick, colds might be the culprit. Adults typically catch two to four colds per year. ...read more

Your heart’s job is to keep your pulse steady to pump blood throughout your body. Sometimes your heart rate is slower when you’re relaxing, and sometimes it’s faster when you’re exercising or stressed. If your heart’s ability to keep the beat starts to go awry, cardiac electrophysiologists like me look for outside help from an implantable device.There are two common implantable devices for the heart: artificial pacemakers and defibrillators. Artificial pacemakers keep blood and ox ...read more

When it comes to the great mathematical problems of the 21st century, the conundrums of jigsaws have been unjustly overlooked for too long. All that now changes thanks to the work of Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, a data scientist at the University of Toronto and Kent Bonsma-Fisher, a quantum physicist, who have settled a problem that has bedeviled puzzlers the world over.The question at the heart of their endeavor is this: if you have a jigsaw of N pieces that once assembled, fills an area equal to A ...read more

In 2017, Jim Webster began going out at night near his New Jersey home to take pictures of our galaxy. With a 14-millimeter lens and a DSLR, he would capture long exposures of the Milky Way galaxy, revealing the delicate filaments of nebulae and countless clusters of stars hidden within the band of the galaxy’s arm.It was a rekindling of a childhood passion for science and astronomy, first sparked by learning about the Apollo program at school. At home, Webster would stick his telescope out of ...read more

Dog breeds like French bulldogs, pugs, and dachshunds may be suffering from an overdose in cuteness. Essentially, selective breeding for the traits that makes them popular is making it harder for some of them to live normal lives.“It’s truly incredible what people have done with really what is supposed to be our companion,” says Enid Stiles, a veterinarian in Montreal who has been practicing for more than two decades. “Unfortunately, we have managed to totally mess them up.”What Is the ...read more

My mother-in-law (a retired nurse and dietitian) used to say that in the U.S., we have some of the most expensive pee in the world. We’re taking so many vitamins and minerals to stay healthy and then urinating those pricey supplements right out.In truth, the absorption of nutrients via a daily multivitamin depends on a host of factors, including the quality of the supplement, whether you have certain diseases that prevent the absorption of nutrients, and the type of vitamin and mineral.Do Mu ...read more

Just as the shift to shorter days and colder weather can bring with it mood swings and other emotional challenges, the holiday season can also bring about somewhat predictable changes in mood and behavior.Around this time of year, many of us experience more stress, anxiety and frustration than usual. These stressors have been linked to higher levels of heart failure and alcohol poisoning and an increase in deaths from stroke.Learning how to recognize what brings about stress and what par ...read more

On Dec. 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) had made a major breakthrough in the pursuit of fusion energy. A team at NIF conducted the first controlled fusion experiment that produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, a condition known as ignition. [embedded content]The team focused 2.05 megajoules of laser light onto a piece of fuel the size of a pepp ...read more