By Sebastian Deffner, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Static electricity is a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It’s all around us, sometimes funny and obvious, as when it makes your hair stand on end, sometimes hidden and useful, as when harnessed by the electronics in your cellphone. The dry winter months are high season for…
Sexual assault enters virtual reality
By Katherine Cross, City University of New York. Although various forms of online sexual harassment have been with us since the dawn of the internet, recent news suggests that it’s moving into another dimension – the third, to be precise. Gropers are now finding a way to target women through the fully immersive headsets of…
What wind, currents and geography tell us about how people first settled Oceania
By Alvaro Montenegro, The Ohio State University. Just look at a map of Remote Oceania – the region of the Pacific that contains Hawaii, New Zealand, Samoa, French Polynesia and Micronesia – and it’s hard not to wonder how people originally settled on these islands. They’re mostly small and located many hundreds to thousands of…
Why insurance companies control your medical care
By Christy Ford Chapin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. It’s that time of year again. Insurance companies that participate in the Affordable Care Act’s state health exchanges are signaling that prices will rise dramatically this fall. And if insurance costs aren’t enough of a crisis, researchers are highlighting deficiencies in health care quality, such as…
Feds: We can read all your email, and you’ll never know
[Editor’s note: this article is themed on legal and ethical issues than science, but we felt our readers would want to know!] By Clark D. Cunningham, Georgia State University. Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts…
How Tiny Primate Virtual Brains Help with Understanding Evolution
Virtual brains reconstructed from ancient, kiwi-sized primate skulls could help resolve one of the most intriguing evolutionary mysteries: how modern primates developed such large brains. Paleontologists found clues in the remarkably preserved skulls of adapiforms, lemur-like primates that scurried around the tropical forests of Wyoming about 50 million years ago. Thought to be a link…
Geomythology: Can geologists relate ancient stories of great floods to real events?
By David R. Montgomery, University of Washington. Modern people have long wondered about ancient stories of great floods. Do they tell of real events in the distant past, or are they myths rooted in imagination? Most familiar to many of us in the West is the biblical story of Noah’s flood. But cultures around the world…
How do you know you’re not living in a computer simulation?
By Laura D’Olimpio, University of Notre Dame Australia. Consider this: right now, you are not where you think you are. In fact, you happen to be the subject of a science experiment being conducted by an evil genius. Your brain has been expertly removed from your body and is being kept alive in a vat…
3D printing: a new threat to gun control and security policy?
By Daniel C. Tirone, Louisiana State University and James Gilley, Louisiana State University . Following the recent mass shooting in Orlando, and the shootings in Minnesota and Dallas, the sharp political divisions over gun control within the U.S. are once again on display. In June, House Democrats even staged a sit-in to advocate for stronger…
