All Subjects

Russ Roberts, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, talks to Matthew Futterman, sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal, about his recent book "Players" on the progress, innovation, and excellence in sports driven by the increasing professionalism of athletes. Read more about this here.

Researchers at the James Cook University studied the ecological effect of humans on the planet and found that around 97% of Earth's biologically richest regions have ecological footprints of humankind. Using information collected through surveys and data collected from remote sensing devices, the researchers analyzed the extent of human activity on the planet and its effect over time. Read more about their research here.

Back in the day, many development economists would tally up a household's ownership of consumer durables to estimate their socioeconomic position. Should they be counting local bug populations instead? A recent paper by Leong et al. in Biology Letters explores the possibility of identifying the socio-economic status of urban neighborhoods by establishing indoor arthropod diversity. Read more about this study here.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign studied the effect of Internet usage on our memory. According to them, we have come to rely heavily on the Internet to access information and to aid our memory. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, have found that the time at which our body is invaded by viruses has an impact on our susceptibility to infection. Conducting a study on mice, the researchers exposed the mice to herpes virus at different times of the day. Read more about their research here. 

For the longest time, researchers have wondered why humans have bigger and more developed brains compared to primates. A new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University has revealed that there is only one feature that distinguishes human and primate brains, which is the number of cortical neurons in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Read more about their research here.

A team of scientists from Norway and NOAA Fisheries' Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle studied the effect of oil spills on the haddock, cod, and pollock species of fish. They discovered that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in crude oil not only affected the development of the heart in fish but also led to extreme craniofacial deformities. Read more about their research here.

Professor Hod Lipso, a roboticist at Columbia Engineering who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing, has along with his students developed a prototype of a 3D food printer. This machine, which resembles a coffee machine, is able to generate edible items such as pastes, gels, powders, and liquid ingredients. Read more about Professor Lipso's invention here.

When researchers at the University of Tübingen and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) were studying Staphylococcus lugdunensis, an antibiotic-resistant pathogen that colonizes the human nasal cavity, they discovered that this pathogen was seldom detected in the presence of Staphylococcus lugdunensis. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the Max Plank Institute led by Didier Stainier, Director of the Department of Developmental Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, have located cloche – a mutant gene present in one of the model organism zebrafish that prevented the development of both blood vessels and blood cells in the zebrafish. Read more about their research here.