Academic scientific workers experiencing chronic exhaustion
A year into the coronavirus pandemic, many in the academic scientific workforce are experiencing a state of chronic exhaustion known as burnout. Although it is not a medical condition and can occur in any workplace where there is stress, burnout is recognised by the World Health Organization as a syndrome....
Scientists celebrate Perseverance Rover’s daring touchdown into Mars’ Jezero Crater
Humanity has just been given a front-row seat to a Mars landing, thanks to a high-resolution, full-colour video that NASA released of its Perseverance Rover descending into Jezero Crater on 18 February. The video shows the drama of the spacecraft’s final descent, from the 21.5-metre-wide parachute billowing overhead to slow...
Big Tech focuses more on engineered fixes rather than how AI exacerbate biases
The most prestigious machine learning conference, NeurIPS, has had at least two Big Tech companies as primary sponsors since 2015, according to the same 2020 study that analysed the influence of Big Tech money in universities. “When considering workshops relating to ethics or fairness, all but one has...
Researchers piloting system that alerts users of possible coronavirus infection
Stanford University is piloting a system that alerts wearable-device users to possible Covid-19 infection, using a two-alarm system. If signals surpass a certain threshold, it produces a yellow alarm. If they remain elevated for 12 hours, it produces a red alarm, strongly suggesting testing or isolating. If there were only...
High school in US sued for firing football coach who queried racist curriculum
An American civil society, Judicial Watch, has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of David Flynn, the father of two Dedham Public School students, who was fired from his position as head football coach after exercising his right as a citizen to raise concerns about his daughter’s seventh-grade history class...
Listening to the sound of silence: How decibel levels hurt the heart and the brain
Exposure to loud noise has long been linked with hearing loss. But the ruckus of planes and cars takes a toll beyond the ears. Traffic noise has been flagged as a major physiological stressor, second to air pollution and on roughly equal footing with exposure to second-hand smoke and radon....
Debunked repeatedly by journalists, fact-checkers, online lies keep mutating
You may have heard the outlandish claim: Bill Gates is using the Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips in everyone so he can track where they go. It’s false, of course, debunked repeatedly by journalists and fact-checking organisations. Yet the falsehood persists online – in fact, it is one of the...
Has the pandemic hit academic mothers really hard? New data say so
Reshma Jagsi, a radiation oncologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor city, wrote an opinion piece predicting female scientists would feel a disproportionate impact from the Coid-19 pandemic. Sceptical journal editors declined to publish it. Since then, though, many commentators have echoed her message. And now the evidence...
Huawei takes HSBC to court to stop extradition of its chief finance officer to US
The Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is taking HSBC bank to court in the UK as part of its attempt to prevent the extradition of its chief financial officer from Canada to the US. Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on a US request over claims she misled HSBC in a...
Private sector invests in new ideas only after regimes make risky investments
The World Health Organisation appointed economist Mariana Mazzucato to head its Council on the Economics of Health for All in 2020. Ms Mazzucato is one of the architects of the biggest international research-funding scheme in the world, Horizon Europe, which launched this month. Her book Mission Economy is a timely...
