Experts In The News
ACCORDING TO PIERS MITCHELL, A paleopathologist from the University of Cambridge, scientists have been extracting data from ancient human poop for over a century. “In the past, we’ve been able to look at a single coprolite from a single person”—that is to say, a preserved turd—”and study the microbiome of that one individual.” (The microbiome is the complex collection of microbes living in every animal’s digestive tract.) Now, in a newly released paper in Philosophical Transactions B, Mitchell and co-authors Susanna Sabin and Kirsten I. Bos have blown the lid off of single-turd analysis: by analyzing two medieval latrines’ worth of number two.
The long-sought goal of finding a superconductor that works at room temperature has been achieved, showing promise for future applications in personal electronics and other technologies, researchers say.
A pandemic is arguably not the optimal time to make theater, considering theaters are closed and actors can’t come within six feet of each other. Yet there’s some exciting work being done within pandemic parameters. This weekend I took in three remarkable performances developed during these locked-down days, as well as one recorded just prior to it (the riveting What the Constitution Means to Me, now on Amazon Prime)…plus three exhilarating Dodgers games. (Go, Dodgers!)
Social media expert Natalie Pennington talks about her study, which looks at what motivates people to engage in political talk online.
The forces that have kept us in exile want us to lose touch with our sense of democratic agency—they want us to feel that we have forever lost our worlds.
It’s the kind of discovery scientists wait a lifetime for. The kind that, with a little - or a lot - more work, could completely change the world as we know it.
Older people who report greater levels of social engagement have more robust gray matter in regions of the brain relevant in dementia, according to new research. It is the first to use a particularly sensitive type of brain imaging to conduct such an evaluation. The findings may have ramifications for older people practicing COVID-19 social isolation.
It was July 26, 1964. The article on page 26 of The Indianapolis Star’s Sunday newspaper would have been easy to miss.
