Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities – Nature

Featured
Paul Marotta/Getty

US universities hire most of their tenure-track faculty members from the same handful of elite institutions, according to a study. The finding suggests that prestige is overvalued in hiring decisions and that academic researchers have little opportunity to obtain jobs at institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were trained.

“Is the system a meritocracy?” asks Daniel Larremore, a computational scientist at UC Boulder who is a co-author . “In peer review, no; in the spread of ideas, no; and in faculty hiring, surely no.”

The children of sickle cell disease are growing up – Nature

Featured
Taj Francis

Sickle-cell disease was once a childhood ailment, simply because many children with the condition died before reaching adulthood. Since 1972, the United States has managed to drastically reduce childhood deaths from the disease, but the outlook has worsened for adults. 

“Adult sickle-cell programmes should be funded like the paediatric ones are,” says Sophie Lanzkron, a haematologist specializing in adults at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s not about education: specialists generally know what to do, the health-care system just isn’t doing it, she says.

What Parents Need to Know About the New Mask Guidance – Slate

Featured
tatyana_tomsickova/iStock/Getty Images Plus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that people vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks indoors. Plenty has been written about whether this decision was well communicated, whether it was too hasty, and whether it could possibly have the intended effect of swaying anyone toward vaccines. But if you’re a parent like me, already exhausted from a year of trying to take care of a small person during a global crisis, you likely have one overarching question: What am I supposed to do now?

“It seems like kids are just getting overlooked in this,” says Tara Smith, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Kent State University in Ohio and parent of a 7-year-old. To navigate this new morass of risk calculations, I spoke to Smith and Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. They had somewhat different outlooks—illustrating just how much work is being thrust on parents right now to make constant judgment calls.

Pregnant People Are Not in Covid-19 Vaccine Trials, and That’s a Problem – Elemental

Featured

Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Excluding pregnant people from vaccine trials has been the default for decades, but experts say this should be rethought — especially now.

Pregnant and breastfeeding people have not been included in any of the Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials for the U.S. market. Will their exclusion delay rollout for them, or will it affect pregnant people’s trust that the vaccine is safe for them? How comprehensively will their reactions to the vaccines be recorded?

Asexuality is for Everyone: A conversation with Angela Chen, author of “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex”

Featured

Illustration by Patrick Leger

Angela Chen’s new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex explores what life is like for people who largely don’t experience sexual desire. It uses asexuality as a lens through which we can sharpen our images of what we want and how we arrange our lives; an impetus for everyone, no matter their sexual drive, to better understand their own desires. NEO.LIFE sat down with Chen to discuss attraction, social norms, and what we’d gain from treating our friends more like lovers—and our lovers more like friends.

Postpartum body changes you should know about – The New York Times

Featured

Illustration by Hye Jin Chung

When I was pregnant, I read four books on pregnancy and two on childbirth. I read no books on what my body would be like during the first year postpartum, because I had never heard of any. During that first year, many people are underinformed about their own bodies, even as they learn vast amounts about their babies. For this piece, I discussed health in the first postpartum year with two ob-gyns, a nurse, two physical therapists who specialize in treating postpartum bodies and two mothers. The experts stressed that you don’t have to live with pain, discomfort or leaking urine, and that your health is as important as your baby’s.

How to Keep Pumping When You Return to Work – The New York Times

Featured

Image by Caroline Tompkins for The New York Times

The vast majority of working parents can’t keep their babies with them while they’re working. This means that if they want to keep breastfeeding while they work, they have to pump breastmilk. I talked to three breastfeeding experts and two lactation consultants; as well as five parents who navigated the decision to pump breastmilk when they returned to work as restaurant managers, police, scientists, soldiers and consultants. In researching this article, I heard about women pumping in printer closets, in the back of Humvees, in bathrooms and while driving. The experts I consulted all said that the best approach is to know your rights, make a plan and communicate transparently with your employer. Both experts and parents agreed: above all, be kind to yourself.

How to support open-source software and stay sane – Nature

Featured

Illustration by The Project Twins

On 10 April, astrophysicists announced that they had captured the first ever image of a black hole. This was exhilarating news, but none of the giddy headlines mentioned that the image would have been impossible without open-source software. The image was created using Matplotlib, a Python library for graphing data, as well as other components of the open-source Python ecosystem. Just five days later, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) rejected a grant proposal to support that ecosystem, saying that the software lacked sufficient impact. It’s a familiar problem: open-source software is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably.

When the Baby You’re Expecting Turns Out to Be Twins (or More!) – The New York Times

Featured

Illustration by Pablo Rochat

So you’ve just found out you’re pregnant with multiples. It’s O.K. to freak out. It’s a lot to process. Katie Ring panicked when she found out she was pregnant with twins, even though she was not at all surprised. “It felt like too much,” she said. “I felt like I was going to lose my whole identity.” For this guide, I sifted through the science, consulted three obstetricians who specialize in multiples, interviewed a mom of twins, and compiled the information you need to know about being pregnant with multiples, without the scaremongering.

VBAC Facts: Is Vaginal Birth After Caesarean Right for You? – The New York Times

Featured

Illustration by Lily Padula

If you’re pregnant and you’ve previously had a cesarean section, you may have a decision to make: Do you try for a vaginal birth after cesarean (otherwise known as a V.B.A.C.) or schedule another cesarean? Deciding whether or not to try for a V.B.A.C. means reckoning with the details of your medical situation in the context of your values, according to the experts. “I think it’s important to know that V.B.A.C. is an option for most women, and their chances of success are actually quite high,” said Dr. Jeanne-Marie Guise, M.D. M.P.H., professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine.

The world’s strongest MRI machines are pushing human imaging to new limits – Nature

Featured

Image credit: Centre for Advanced Imaging, The University of Queensland

On a cold morning in Minneapolis last December, a man walked into a research centre to venture where only pigs had gone before: into the strongest magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine built to scan the human body. First, he changed into a hospital gown, and researchers made sure he had no metal on his body: no piercings, rings, metal implants or pacemakers. Any metal could be ripped out by the immensely powerful, 10.5-tesla magnet — weighing almost 3 times more than a Boeing 737 aeroplane and a full 50% more powerful than the strongest magnets approved for clinical use. “This is a window we’ve just never had in the intact human brain,” says Ravi Menon.

How cerebral organoids are guiding brain-cancer research and therapies – Nature

Featured

Image credit: M. Lancaster/MRC-LMB

People with glioblastoma multiforme, one of the most common forms of brain cancer, have a median survival of less than 15 months after diagnosis. If researchers could grow numerous small brain-like structures that contained a replica of the person’s tumour and then bathe them in various treatments, in the space of a few weeks, they might learn exactly which ones would have the best chance of fighting brain cancer in that individual. Howard Fine, a neuro-oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, is developing such models, known as cerebral organoids. Organoids are particularly valuable for studying brain cancer because neither human brain tumours transplanted into mice nor human tumour stem cells grown in a culture dish behave in the same way as their counterparts in the body.

Fixing gerrymandering with geometry – Tufts Now

Featured

Photo: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University

The esoteric world of pure math doesn’t usually play much of a role in promoting fairness in the U.S. political system, but Tufts mathematicians Moon Duchin and Mira Bernstein believe that needs to change. It is math, they say, that could help overcome gerrymandering—the practice of drawing legislative districts that favor one party, class or race.

Read the full story in Tufts Now.

How to build a human cell atlas – Nature

Featured

photo by Casey Atkins for Nature

Aviv Regev likes to work at the edge of what is possible. In 2011, the computational biologist was collaborating with molecular geneticist Joshua Levin to test a handful of methods for sequencing RNA. The scientists were aiming to push the technologies to the brink of failure and see which performed the best. They processed samples with degraded RNA or vanishingly small amounts of the molecule. Eventually, Levin pointed out that they were sequencing less RNA than appears in a single cell.

To Regev, that sounded like an opportunity. The cell is the basic unit of life and she had long been looking for ways to explore how complex networks of genes operate in individual cells, how those networks can differ and, ultimately, how diverse cell populations work together. The answers to such questions would reveal, in essence, how complex organisms such as humans are built.

Read the full story in Nature.

What will it take to 3-D print organs? – NeoLife

Featured

Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock; Scientific Reports

Every day in the U.S., about 22 people die waiting for an organ transplant. If scientists could 3-D print organs like kidneys, livers and hearts, all those lives could be saved. For years, people have been touting personalized organ printing as the future.

But despite decades of promising work in bioengineered bladders and other kinds of human tissue, we’re not close to having more complicated organs made from scratch. Harvard professor Jennifer Lewis, a leader in advanced 3-D printing of biological tissue, has only recently developed the ability to print part of a nephron, an individual unit of a kidney.

I asked Lewis what it will take to someday print a full kidney or a similarly complex organ.

Read the full story in NeoLife.

Take two placebos and call me in the morning – NeoLife

Featured

Illustration by Gabriel Alcala

When a new drug is being tested in a controlled clinical trial, half the patients get the real drug and half get a placebo, something harmless like a sugar pill or a saline injection. But patients on the placebo often improve anyway, and that’s because they expect that they’re getting the real drug, right? Well, no. Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk’s research has exploded that explanation. Read the full story in NeoLife.

Spiking genomic databases with misinformation could protect patient privacy – Nature

Featured

Nature

Large genomic databases are indispensable for scientists looking for genetic variations associated with diseases. But they come with privacy risks for people who contribute their DNA. To address those concerns, a system developed by Bonnie Berger and Sean Simmons, computer scientists at MIT, masks the donor’s identity by adding a small amount of noise, or random variation, to the results it returns on a user’s query.

If you give a mouse a menstrual cycle – Nature

Featured

fotandy/Getty

Mice are a mainstay of biomedical research laboratories. But the rodents are poor models for studying women’s reproductive health, because they don’t menstruate. Now researchers at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, say that they have found a rodent that defies this conventional wisdom: the spiny mouse (Acomys cahirinus). If the finding holds up, the animal could one day be used to research women’s menstruation-related health conditions.

Power of positive thinking skews mindfulness studies – Nature

Featured

Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS

There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique.

Researchers at McGill University analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely. The team also examined another 21 trials that were registered with databases such as ClinicalTrials.gov; of these, 62% were unpublished 30 months after they finished. The findings hint that negative results are going unpublished.

Read the full story in Nature.

Why People Turn to Lemurs and Other Endangered Animals for Dinner in Madagascar – Smithsonian

Featured

Image credit: Thomas Marent/Minden Pictures/Corbis

Madagascar is home to many unique and threatened mammals, such as lemurs and small hedgehog-like creatures called tenrecs. Most people wouldn’t think of consuming one of these animals, but for many in Madagascar, bushmeat is on the menu. Scientists assumed that people turned to wild meat just to survive, but two new studies that examine the entire supply chain for this meat have found that consumption of wild mammals in Madagascar is common and far more open a practice than anyone had suspected.Read the full article in Smithsonian.

Conor Walsh | Innovators Under 35 – MIT Technology Review

Featured

Walsh with his soft robotic exosuit.

This robotics researcher might have something in just your size.

Most robotics labs don’t contain sewing machines. But there’s a room full of them in Conor Walsh’s lab, along with three full-time textile experts and a wall of fabrics in neat plastic bins. There’s a rack that looks as if it belongs in a sporting goods store, with a row of what could be some new kind of running shorts in an array of sizes.

For Walsh, a robot is not necessarily a rigid metal machine. He’s working on robots that are soft, lightweight, and flexible so people can wear them to enhance their abilities.

Read the full profile in MIT Technology Review.

Should babies have their genomes sequenced? – MIT Technology Review

Featured

Illustration by Sophia Foster-Dimino

The BabySeq project in Boston has begun collecting data to quantify the risks and benefits of DNA sequencing at birth.

The central question for this project is what will come of giving genomic information to parents and their baby’s doctor. Will doctors order more tests and interventions? Will those tests and interventions make babies healthier? Or will they just waste money, or even end up doing more harm than good?

Read the full article in MIT Technology Review.

Are mothers too easy to blame? – Nature book review

Sanja Vrzic/Shutterstock

Rachel Yehuda’s 2016 study claimed that the children of Holocaust survivors have epigenetic changes at a particular site in the genome, and those changes make them more susceptible to stress. Yehuda’s study has been criticized often for its small sample size, tiny control group and outsize claims of causality. Sarah Richardson’s book The Maternal Imprint broadens this criticism to the field of human transgenerational epigenetics more generally. She argues that social assumptions about maternal responsibility lend ideas in this field more credibility than they deserve on the basis of the data. 

How much should we really worry about the coronavirus variants? – Slate

Photo: Jacek Pobłocki on Unsplash

New coronavirus variants are spreading: the so-called South Africa, U.K., and Brazil variants, as well as newer variants like the ones that have popped up in New York City and California. You might have some questions about what this all means for vaccines, masks (and lack thereof), and our general future. I spoke to four experts, and here’s what they say we know—and what we’re still waiting to find out.