Magazine Posts

"A vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) design created at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has wound up in the hands of a Chinese company, which has since gone on to become the largest manufacturer of VRFBs in the world" The US, which owns the patent and invested $15 million of taxpayer dollars into its development, reportedly has no domestic production site for the novel VRFBs" ..... Read more at The Register

"While many American students and their parents worry that the next mass shooting could happen at their school, schools are also facing a number of other threats that do not involve guns. Many of these threats are related to the mental health of educators and students" .... Read more

"Proteins are the building blocks of life, chains of amino acids that can twist and bend into a mind-boggling variety of shapes. Last year, DeepMind AI cracked a 50-year-old problem of protein folding and published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. Now, it's Alphafold AI has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200M proteins.... .. AI is paving the way for the development of new medicines or technologies to tackle global challenges such as famine or pollution" Read more
Image Credit: DeepMind

Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression were a leading cause of global health problems even before the spread of COVID-19; however, they’ve gotten worse........  worldwide  rates have increased by an overwhelming 25%. In the U.S., 4 in 10 adults have reported symptoms of anxiety or depression during the pandemic, compared with 1 in 10 from January to June 2019..... Read more

"It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the noise swells to a bellowing bass line, until it drowns out the symphony of life" ...Read more 

Photo credit: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and supplies water to Millions of people across seven states, tribal lines and northern Mexico. Many of these areas are experiencing some level of drought.

Source: : NASA Earth Observatory. (July 2000, 2021, 2022) ... Read more

"Americans see value in higher education ...... Most say a college degree is important, if not essential, in helping a young person succeed in the world......  While fewer than half of today’s young adults are enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, the share has risen steadily over the past several decades....... Even so, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction – even suspicion – among the public about the role colleges play in society, .... And these views are increasingly linked to partisanship....Read the full article 

"The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not"..... Read more

"....unlike many infections that strike within hospitals, the federal government doesn’t require hospitals to report cases of NVHAP. As a result, few hospitals understand the origin of the illness, track its occurrence, or actively work to prevent it, the experts said." Read more

"City lights that blaze all night are profoundly disrupting urban plants’ phenology – shifting when their buds open in the spring and when their leaves change colors and drop in the fall........... nighttime lights are lengthening the growing season in cities, which can affect everything from allergies to local economies"..... Read more

....."Taking the work and the knowledge and the discoveries of those that came before you. And, in your life time, you are going to move it forward in ways no one could have imagine. And you’re not going to get all the way. And that’s OK. Because without your effort, humanity is never going to get there...."Read more

"Formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, s The Trial which started on July 10 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school."

"The trial publicized the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, which set Modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion, against Fundamentalists, who said the Word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge. The case was thus seen both as a theological contest and as a trial on whether evolution should be taught in schools". Read more