Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
This Day in World History
The April 25, 1953 edition of the journal Nature included a scientific paper that opened new doors in scientific understanding. The paper, written by James Watson and Francis Crick, described the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the substance that determines the hereditary traits of a living organism.
By Dr Mark McCann
Older men have been getting a bad press. Women are admitted to nursing and residential homes at a greater rate than men of the same age and health. There is an assumption that the reason for this gender difference is that older men are less willing than older women to care for their dependent partners: that for cultural or personal reasons ‘old men don’t do caring’.
By Wallace Scot McFarlane
Many rivers in the United States carry the burden of having been severely polluted. Indeed all the rivers on which I have lived were once no healthier than an open sewer: the Trinity River (Dallas’s untreated sewage), the Concord River (military-industrial complex Superfund sites), the Androscoggin River (paper mills), the Charles River (“love that muddy water!”), and the Willamette River (paper mills). Although none of these rivers live up to the clean water promised by the Clean Water Act, they are nonetheless much cleaner and offer plenty of recreational opportunities, often neglected by the many people who call these watersheds home.
By Mitch Earleywine
Cannabis became essentially illegal in the United States in 1937. Perhaps this 75 year experiment has provided enough data for some informed decisions. We’re up to over 800,000 arrests each year, with government spending billions annually on marijuana control. Yet more people have tried the plant than ever before. Several authors suggest that alternatives to prohibition might prove cheaper, send fewer people through our courts, and maintain respect for the law. It seems oddly un-American that a citizen can go to jail for owning a plant, especially here in the land of the free. But change is scary, and fear runs politics in frightening ways.
One of the hallmarks of an expert is to make what they are doing look effortless. Whether it is tossing pizza, throwing a clay pot on a wheel, or executing the perfect forehand smash, the experts make it look easy. The part that we don’t see is the hundreds of hours of practice, and the hundreds of times it has gone wrong; the shreds of dough stuck to the light bulb.
Have you ever wondered if it is really possible for others to know what you are thinking? Our brains seem to allow both “internal” points of view, and “external” ones. As individuals, we know them from the inside as we experience our thoughts, perceptions and emotions. Scientists, on the other hand, only know our brains from the outside, as they employ brain imaging, EEG, or other types of techniques.
By Mary Coleman
Autism was first described in 1943 and since then, the understanding of this disease entity by the scientific community has greatly changed. In 2012, autism is now considered a behaviorally defined neurodevelopmental disorder arising well before birth, characterized by a marked clinical and etiological heterogeneity. Recently there is a question whether there may be an epidemic of autism, as the rates of diagnosis have continued to rise to alarming levels.
By Janet Radcliffe Richards
The trouble with many significant advances in medicine is that that they take us out of our moral depth. They may raise quite different problems from the ones we are used to and, if we are not careful, we may inadvertently undermine the wonderful potential of new technologies by forcing them into existing legal, ethical and institutional frameworks.
By Harry Ostrer
Exactly who are we anyway? Over the last generation, population genetics has emerged as a science that has made the discovery of human origins, relatedness, and diversity knowable in a way that is simple not possible from studying texts, genealogies, or archeological remains. Viewed as the successor to a race science that promoted the superiority of some human groups over others and that provided a basis for prejudice, forced sterilization, and even extermination, population genetics is framed as a discipline that is based on discovery using the amazing content of fully sequenced human genomes and novel computational methods. None of the recent discoveries would have been possible in the past. And what have we learned?
I’ve seen proud posts on the internet from people who saw five planets with the naked eye this spring. Venus and Jupiter could hardly be missed in the west after sunset, though Mercury was more elusive as it never strays very far from the Sun and is smaller and fainter. Later in the evening Mars and then Saturn have been rising high in the east. That’s a “full house”, comprising all five of the planets recognised by the ancients. Being a geologist, I usually insist on claiming that a sixth planet is easily visible too…
By David Blockley
Engineering is everywhere. We rely on it totally and yet, most of us tend to take it for granted. Do you ever stop to wonder how the water gets to your taps or the electricity to your home? From the water we drink, the food we eat, the electricity we use, the tools we work with, the gadgets that entertain us, to the cars, trains and aeroplane we travel in, we all too often fail to think about the engineers who make it happen, the skills they need and the challenges they face.
This Day in World History
Poet T.S. Eliot might still be right—the world might end with a whimper. But on April 1, 1948, physicists George Gamow and Ralph Alpher first proposed the now prevailing idea of how the universe began—with a big bang.
The law is based on reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological biases or unconscious influences. Judges frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. Or so we think. We sat down with Director of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) and editor of Ideology, Psychology, and Law, Professor Jon Hanson, to discuss the interaction of psychology and the law, and how they interact to form ideologies by which we all must live.
By Duncan Calow
It is only March, but 2012 has already seen a series of contract disputes over digital media and technology hit the headlines, with cases filed by Peter Frampton, HarperCollins, and new media company Phonedog.com
By Allan V. Horwitz
The latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the DSM-5, now scheduled to be published in May 2013, has generated a tremendous amount of controversy. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association to provide common language and criteria for the diagnosis of mental disorders, so any proposed changes to its terminology could mean millions more, or millions less, diagnosed with an illness. Nevertheless, the proposed changes in the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) have been relatively neglected.
By Caroline Relton
Epidemiology, a well established cornerstone of medical research, is a group level discipline that aims to decipher the distribution and causes of diseases in populations. Epigenetics, perceived by many as the most fashionable research arena in which to be involved, is a mechanism of gene regulation. What brings these perhaps unlikely partners together?