RealClearScience Articles

No lethal pandemic lasts forever. The 1918 flu, for example, crisscrossed the globe and claimed tens of millions of lives, yet by 1920, the virus that caused it had become significantly less deadly, causing only ordinary seasonal flu. Some pandemics have lasted longer, like the Black Death, which swept out of Central Asia in 1346, spread across Europe, and ultimately may have killed as many as a third of the inhabitants of Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. That pandemic, too, came to an end, roughly seven years after it started, probably because so many had perished or developed...

When modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, they made a discovery that was to change the course of history. The continent was already populated by our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, which recent evidence suggests had their own relatively sophisticated culture and technology. But within a few thousand years the Neanderthals were gone, leaving our species to continue its spread to every corner of the globe. Precisely how Neanderthals became extinct remains a subject of fierce debate among researchers. The two main explanations given in recent years have been...

  Black holes are notable for many things, especially their simplicity. They're just … holes. That are "black." This simplicity allows us to draw surprising parallels between black holes and other branches of physics. For example, a team of researchers has shown that a special kind of particle can exist around a pair of black holes in a similar way as an electron can exist around a pair of hydrogen atoms — the first example of a "gravitational molecule." This strange object may give us hints to the identity of dark matter and the ultimate nature of...

by Michael Schulson - Undark Magazine Four years ago, polls indicated that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would handily beat her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump. Based on those polls, one prominent election forecaster, Princeton University neuroscience professor Sam Wang, even called the race for Clinton several weeks before Election Day, promising to eat an insect if he was wrong. Wang ate a cricket on CNN, and in May of 2017, a committee at the American Association for Public Opinion Research, or AAPOR, released a post-mortem of the polls’ performance. The...

When fossils of the oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, were first discovered almost 160 years ago, the find created a puzzle that has troubled palaeontologists ever since. These fossils were celebrated for their chimera-like combination of supposedly reptilian features (such as a bony tail and jaws with teeth) and those seemingly unique to birds – in particular, feathers. They helped demonstrate that birds actually evolved from dinosaurs. But they also presented a major evolutionary problem. The prehistoric feathers were indistinguishable from those of birds today. So it wasn’t...

For most people, running a marathon sounds like a lot of work — and they probably wouldn’t even consider completing more than one within 24 hours. The will to go the extra mile is what lies at the very heart of ultra-endurance events (and that’s exactly why they’re called “ultra”). These events are for athletes who go beyond the typical marathon distance of about 42km, or engage in physical exertion for more than six hours. They’re generally performed via biking, swimming or running, but can also be held in activities such as kayaking. Our new...

Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis – the Neanderthals. They weren’t our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel. Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become. It’s tempting to see them in idyllic terms, living peacefully with nature and each other, like Adam and Eve in the Garden. If so, maybe humanity’s ills – especially our...

Black holes – regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape – are a hot topic in the news these days. Half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Roger Penrose for his mathematical work showing that black holes are an inescapable consequence of Einstein’s theory of gravity. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared the other half for showing that a massive black hole sits at the center of our galaxy. Black holes are scary for three reasons. If you fell into a black hole left over when a star died, you would be shredded. Also, the massive black...

by Mark Wolverton - Undark Magazine Before the atomic bomb came along, chemical weapons were the ultimate red line — the boundary between supposedly civilized warfare and unrestrained barbarism. Even before their horrors were first unleashed on a large scale in World War I, nations had sought to ban the use of "poison weapons." After approximately 90,000 were killed by gas warfare during World War I, the moral and legal revulsion intensified. Numerous solemn proclamations and protocols were created in which civilized nations pledged never again to use such ghastly weapons. But such...

An expansive city flourished almost a thousand years ago in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River across the water from where St. Louis, Missouri stands today. It was one of the greatest pre-Columbian cities constructed north of the Aztec city of Tenochititlan, at present-day Mexico City. The people who lived in this now largely forgotten city were part of a monument-building, corn-farming culture. No one knows what its inhabitants named this place, but today archaeologists call the city Cahokia. Excavations show it was home to thousands of families. The city held hundreds of earthen...

Feeling under the weather? Chances are you or your doctor will grab a thermometer, take your temperature and hope for the familiar 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) everyone recognizes as “normal.” But what is normal and why does it matter? Despite the fixation on 98.6 F, clinicians recognize that there is no single universal “normal” body temperature for everyone at all times. Throughout the day, your body temperature can vary by as much as 1 F, at its lowest in the early morning and highest in the late afternoon. It changes when you are sick, goes up...

In the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Measure of a Man,” Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for research purposes unless Captain Picard can argue that Data deserves the same rights as a human being. Naturally the question arises: What is the basis upon which something has rights? What gives an entity moral standing? The philosopher Peter Singer argues that creatures that can feel pain or suffer have a claim to moral standing. He argues that nonhuman animals have moral standing, since they can feel pain and suffer....

Black licorice may look and taste like an innocent treat, but this candy has a dark side. On Sept. 23, 2020, it was reported that black licorice was the culprit in the death of a 54-year-old man in Massachusetts. How could this be? Overdosing on licorice sounds more like a twisted tale than a plausible fact. I have a longstanding interest in how chemicals in our food and the environment affect our body and mind. When something seemingly harmless like licorice is implicated in a death, we are reminded of the famous proclamation by Swiss physician Paracelsus, the Father of Toxicology:...

The search for dark matter – an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe – is at a crossroads. Although it was proposed nearly 70 years ago and has been searched for intensely - with large particle colliders, detectors deep underground and even instruments in space – it is still nowhere to be found. But astronomers have promised to leave “no stone unturned” and have started to cast their net wider out into the galaxy. The idea is to extract information from astrophysical objects that may have witnessed chunks...

Paleontologists have revealed two separate fossils of embryonic tyrannosaurids. Dr. Gregory Funston of the University of Edinburgh recently detailed these specimens at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. The two fossils – a foot claw and a lower jawbone – represent some of the youngest specimens of tyrannosaurs known to science. Both have been dated to 71-75 million years ago, placing these creatures' brief lifespans sometime at the tail end of the Cretaceous Period. At this time, large, efficient-hunting theropods like the tyrannosaurids roamed across...

  Scientists have reconstructed a long-lost tectonic plate that may have given rise to an arc of volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean 60 million years ago.  The plate, dubbed Resurrection, has long been controversial among geophysicists, as some believe it never existed. But the new reconstruction puts the edge of the rocky plate along a line of known ancient volcanoes, suggesting that it was once part of the crust (Earth's top layer) in what is today northern Canada.  "Volcanoes form at plate boundaries, and the more plates you have, the more volcanoes you have," Jonny Wu,...

by Joshua Roebke - Undark Magazine For the past several years, I have taught a seminar called The Literature of Science to a dozen or so honors students at the University of Texas. These clever undergraduates are all majoring in the hard sciences, and most of them already have some experience doing research. We read stories, both fiction and nonfiction, and discuss how authors communicate science and depict scientists, whether real or imagined. We are trying to understand, beyond our particular experiences, what science is and what scientists do. During a recent meeting, my students and I...

by Emma Yasinski - Undark Magazine Normally, when James Stone, a pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, does autopsies, he has an audience — a dozen or so students, pathology fellows, assistants, and even attending physicians, hoping to learn from his work. But since the Covid-19 pandemic began, Stone has done autopsies on Covid-19 victims with just one or two other colleagues in the room. Instead of the usual gloves, mask, goggles, apron and other gear that pathologists don during autopsies, he wears what he calls “full-hazmat-style gear” as he makes a Y-shaped...