Last month, the House Appropriations Committee of the U.S. Congress began drafting its Fiscal Year 2020 funding bill. Among the promising news is the committee's support for a $2 billion increase above Fiscal Year 2019 for the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first step in what is likely to be a long and contentious budget process. Why, then, is the cycle of success that the U.S. scientific enterprise has enjoyed since the mid-20th century in jeopardy?
Researchers have developed a new technology that allows them to probe cell changes without disturbing the cell's physiology – an advancement that helps scientists look more closely at cell changes to understand human health, according to a new paper in Cell Reports. The research was performed by professor Soham Ghosh, Colorado State University, professor Corey P. Neu, University of Colorado at Boulder, and others.
As a living laboratory, the Sargasso Sea—with its masses of sargassum and their cargoes of lilliputian creatures—has yielded important findings about how and why the ocean matters to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It was in 1986 that Prochlorococcus — Earth’s smallest and most numerous photosynthetic organisms — were discovered in the Sargasso. Now known to occur globally, they churn out as much as 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Seaweed and microscopic organisms provide oxygen for life in the sea and more than half the oxygen in the air we breathe. The carbon dioxide they capture is transformed with water into sugar, helping to fuel the complex ocean food webs that culminate in tuna, sharks, whales — and us.
If “I told you so” had a sensation, it would be the sweet cocoon of an 80-degree workspace. For years, women have been saying that the AC is on too damn high. We’ve dragged not one but two sweaters to the office in the summer: one for our slowly numbing legs, and one for our shivering shoulders. Scientific studies have already shown that offices are set for men’s frostier preferred temperatures.
When it comes to academic conferences, it seems most of us belong to one of two groups. The first is the research poster group, which has conversations with other scholars with the help of a visual aid. The second is the panel of papers group, where each panelist prepares a 20- to 25-minute presentation and then a discussant or moderator takes questions from the audience.
In the 25 years since my book The Hot Zone traced the emergence of extremely lethal viruses, one of them has proved to be the most destructive: Ebola. At this writing, Ebola has killed hundreds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the second largest outbreak since the virus was identified in 1976. The largest—from 2014 to 2016 in three West African nations—resulted in almost 30,000 cases, nearly half of them fatal. Fierce international efforts helped quell Ebola that time, but there are no assurances that the virus (above) has ended its assaults on the human species. Ebola is hard to arrest for many complicated reasons (below). But scientists keep trying—and what they learn will equip us to face this virus, and possibly worse, in the future.
