Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Claudio Tuniz
Neanderthal was once the only human in Europe. By 40,000 years ago, after surviving through several ice ages, his days (or, at least, his millennia) were numbered. The environment of the Pleistocene epoch was slightly radioactive, the same way it is today, but this was not Neanderthal’s problem. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the arrival of a new human
By Peggy Mason, MD
Recently the second year-medical students (Class of 2014) at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine honored me with the L.D.H. Wood Pre-Clinical Teaching Award. This occasion prompted me to reflect on what made the Medical Neurobiology class that I taught in the fall of 2011 so successful. I believe that the following were key to the class’s success.
International Tiger Day, also known as Global Tiger Day, is an annual celebration held annually on 29 July. The initiative of the Saint Petersburg Tiger Summit, the day raises awareness of tiger conservation, promotes opportunities for discussing the tiger’s natural habitats, and encourages support for ongoing conservation efforts. Ahead of International Tiger Day this Sunday, we take a look at the threats tigers face today with n this amended extract from The Encyclopedia of Mammals.
By I. William Zartman
Genocide doesn’t burst out unannounced. It is preceded and prepared by identity conflict that escalates from social friction to contentious politics, from politics to violence, and eventually to targeted mass killing. The United Nations in 1946 defined genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups” and redefined it in 1948 as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” It can be carried out by rebel movements, but it is more frequently the work of the sovereign state.
By Jenifer Glynn
If Rosalind Franklin had lived, she would have been 92 today. But she died at 37, five years after the discovery of the structure of DNA had been announced by Watson and Crick. As Crick confessed later (but never confessed to her), “the data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin”.
By Catherine Belling
We used to feel reassured by the possibility that medicine might soon be able to find any disease hidden inside our bodies before it could do real harm, and remove it before we even began to feel sick. “Disease awareness” and “early detection” became public health buzzwords. We have been encouraged to get screened for diseases we probably don’t have (but just might). Some began paying for full body CT scans in the hope of catching and fixing all possible anomalies and pathologies the instant they appeared. What could possibly be wrong with such diligent vigilance?
By Richard Giannone
The International Conference on AIDS is announcing the details about Trudeva, the new drug from Gilead Science, that has shown to be effective in lowering the risk of HIV infection. It’s a single pill that in Brazilian trials reduces the rate of infection. The drug is expensive, about $12,000 a year. With 15,000 new infections a year and 1.2 million already infected with HIV, the drug is well worth the price.
By Kurt C. Organista
30 years into the epidemic I remain struck by is how HIV continues to exploit our country’s entrenched social, cultural, and economic cleavages — almost to the point of appearing to be a homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic virus! Latinos now rank second to African Americans in their disproportionately high rates of AIDS cases: 50% & 20%, respectively, despite only composing 13% & 15% of the US population. Consider for example that 75% of AIDS cases in the US are among men who have sex with men (MSM), and the same is true within US Latino population.
By Bruce Hood
I have been known on occasion to offer an audience the opportunity to wear a second-hand cardigan that it has been cleaned for $20. After an initial “what’s the catch?” reluctance, a large proportion of the audience usually raise their hands to volunteer. At this point, I tell them that the cardigan previously belonged to a mass murderer. For US audiences, it’s Jeffrey Dahmer whereas Fred West is our psychopath of choice in the UK. At this point you probably realize that I am lying and the cardigan does not belong to either.
While the UK government worries about visitors streaming through customs at Heathrow, locals around the new Olympic site are worried about what the sudden wave of visitors will mean to them. What can they expect as ticket-holders jam roads, crowd public transport, and over-run East London? Will the commitment to public health hold true for transportation? And what will happen after the closing ceremony?
By William deBuys
The dirty little secret about water in the West is that water conservation is a hoax. When we conserve water by using less, we don’t save it for the health of the watershed or put it aside in any way; we simply make it available for someone else to consume, if not today, then tomorrow in the next strip mall or housing development down the road.
By Norman Sartorius
When asked, many people with mental illness will say that the consequences of the stigma of mental illness are worse than the illness itself. Stigmatization affects the position that people have in their community, their employment, their housing, the size and functioning of their social network. An episode of mental illness which is well treated may leave no trace in the mental state or functional capacity of the individual. Yet the stigma related to the disease will last for the rest of a person’s life and even often have repercussions for descendants of the person who experienced a stigmatizing illness.
By Steve Savage
In my last blog posting I wrote in defense of Auto-Tune. So if it’s not Auto-Tune, then what is wrong with pop? To the extent that technological capabilities have created a problem, it’s the loudness war that created it. A brick wall limiter is the tool that makes digital audio files loud and in the process it can crush the dynamics and render the music lifeless. The effect is actually very powerful.
By Michael Levine-Clark
One of the things that I love about being a librarian is that as a profession, we work together to share ideas and resources. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this collaborative spirit is interlibrary loan (ILL). We send each other books, DVDs, CDs, articles — whatever we can reasonably share. And we do this at considerable expense to our own institutions because we see a mutual benefit.
By Dennis Baron
Machines can grade essays just as well as human readers. According to the New York Times, a competition sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation produced software able to match human essay readers grade for grade, and a study of commercially-available automatic grading programs showed that computers assessed essays as accurately as human readers, but a whole lot faster, and cheaper, to boot. But that’s just the start: computers could lead to a reading-free future.
By Jan Westerhoff
Most people think that even though it is possible that they are dreaming right now, the probability for this is very small, perhaps as small as winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. In fact the probability is quite high. Let’s do the maths.