US President Biden and Facebook feud over Covid vaccine hesitancy as virus ravages Americans
The White House and Facebook got into a feud over the past few days after President Biden and aides repeatedly accused the company of doing too little to combat Covid vaccine misinformation. On Thursday, US surgeon general Vivek Murthy released an advisory about health misinformation that included some fairly banal...
Russian ransomware: President Biden warns Putin US ready to take cyber war to Moscow
In Geneva last month, US President Joe Biden tried to set some ground rules for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. He said cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure were “off limits”. “I looked at him and said: how would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields? He...
Facebook supremacy: US federal court tosses out antitrust cases against Big Tech
What if nothing works? What if, after years of scholarship and journalism exposing the dominance, abrogation, duplicity, arrogance and incompetence of Facebook, none of the policy tools we have come to rely on to rein in corporations make any difference at all? We have to be prepared for just such...
How Trumpists weaponised ‘smokescreen trolling’ and waged ideological war
Some of the claims coming out of the Trump camp in recent weeks are laughable: that Joe Biden is the Hamburglar, that Democrats are conspiring to take away the Chick-fil-A sauces of “real” Americans, that socialism is making your burritos more expensive. Some are much more serious, but just as...
‘Every time one of us is rejected, dismissed or murdered, I question why I’m still in academia’
As marchers in the United States and around the world filled the streets this past week to protest against police brutality and racial injustice, Black scientists grieved openly on social media, calling for action on racism in society and in science. Many stated ways in which institutions and colleagues, from...
Much as Covid is ravaging the world, ‘without viruses, we would not be alive’
Mya Breitbart has hunted novel viruses in African termite mounds, Antarctic seals and water from the Red Sea. But to hit pay dirt, she has only to step into her back garden in Florida. Hanging around her swimming pool are spiny-backed orbweavers (Gasteracantha cancriformis) – striking spiders with bulbous white...
Bullying: Universities around the world grapple with academic-related stressors
Bullying is endemic in academia, an environment riddled with hierarchies and hyper-competition, exacerbated by an over-reliance on temporary contracts and the pressure to land highly coveted tenured positions. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, in any 12-month period, on average, 25 per cent of faculty members...
Heatwaves in US and Canada: You warm up the planet, you increase incidence of heat extremes
As temperatures surged past 100 degrees, Bree Oswill gathered all the blankets and towels she could find and taped them to every window that didn’t have a shade. She doesn’t have central air conditioning and wanted to prevent every bit of sunlight and heat from entering her home. Growing up...
Black In X: African-American academics mount efforts to uproot racism from science
In the wake of global protests against anti-Black racism last year, a movement emerged to celebrate Black scientists and fight systemic oppression in academia. Researchers in fields across science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) worldwide, but especially in the United States, rallied around social-media hashtags and attended online community events....
What’s the colour of sleep? How genetic code determines area code and rest time
What’s the colour of sleep? How the genetic code determines area and resting time Remember the line from that old folk song? If living were a thing that money could buy You know the rich would live and the poor would die. Sadly, there’s little “if” about it. On average,...
