Guest Work

Choosing the care you’ll receive at the end of your life doesn’t always go to plan. Here are some tips to make sure it does

Guest Author • May 21, 2021

• end of life care,
• medicine

Charles Corke, Deakin University   Advances in medical technology have dramatically altered the process of dying. It’s now possible to prolong life, with the frightening reality that this may simply extend our dying process. Advance care planning is designed to empower us to retain some control over the last stages of our life by communicating our wishes about what we … Read More

Slaves to speed, we’d all benefit from ‘slow cities’

Guest Author • May 21, 2021

• cars,
• climate change,
• cycling,
• public transport,
• Transport,
• walking

Paul Tranter, UNSW and Rodney Tolley, Staffordshire University   Slowing transport in cities provides immense benefits for the health of people, economies and the planet, so why are we still obsessed with speed? As Mahatma Gandhi observed: There is more to life than increasing its speed. This speaks to our own physical and mental well-being, as well as to … Read More

Making Sense of the Great Whip Spider Boom

Guest Author • May 19, 2021

• Science,
• spiders,
• whip spiders

May 17, 2021 by Eric Boodman About 18 years ago, Andrea Colla got an unusual request. Would he come survey the fauna of a Nazi air-raid shelter? Even by entomologists’ standards, the task was weird. This warren lay under the Italian city of Trieste, and it was built in secret between 1943 and 1944 at the orders … Read More

Life in the deep freeze – the revolution that changed our view of glaciers forever

Guest Author • May 18, 2021

• climate change,
• glaciers

Jemma Wadham, University of Bristol   I’ve been fascinated by glaciers since I was 14, when geography textbooks taught me about strange rivers of ice that crept down yawning valleys like giant serpents stalking their next meal. That kernel of wonder has carried me through a career of more than 25 years. I’ve travelled to the world’s peaks and its … Read More

When the Line Between Life and Death Is ‘A Little Bit Fuzzy’

Guest Author • May 13, 2021

• death,
• ethics,
• medicine

May 10, 2021 by Lola Butcher   Until Sept. 17, 2020, Sharon Frederick was an ostensibly healthy 63-year-old woman who spent her days caring for her disabled sister and going to church. That evening, she was praying the rosary over the telephone with a friend when she began slurring her words. By the time an ambulance delivered her … Read More

Taking one for the team: 6 ways our cells can die and help fight infectious disease

Guest Author • May 10, 2021

• cells,
• COVID-19,
• disease

Georgia Atkin-Smith, La Trobe University and Ivan Poon, La Trobe University We have all heard of COVID-19, the flu and bacterial infections. But what is actually happening to our cells when we contract these diseases? Many of our body’s cells don’t live to tell the tale. But cell death isn’t necessarily a bad thing — in fact, the death of … Read More

Farewell the utopian city. To cope with climate change we must learn from how nature adapts

Guest Author • May 07, 2021

• Adaptation,
• cities,
• climate change,
• Nature,
• urban planning

Mohammed Makki, University of Technology Sydney   “Among all species, it is perhaps only humans who create habitats that are not fit to live in.” – Stephen Marshall It’s a damning statement but one that can be reasonably argued to be true. We don’t have the best track record in creating lasting and sustainable habitats, especially if one … Read More

Why we remember more by reading – especially print – than from audio or video

Guest Author • May 04, 2021

• books,
• COVID-19,
• digital technology,
• reading

Naomi S. Baron, American University   During the pandemic, many college professors abandoned assignments from printed textbooks and turned instead to digital texts or multimedia coursework. As a professor of linguistics, I have been studying how electronic communication compares to traditional print when it comes to learning. Is comprehension the same whether a person reads a text onscreen … Read More

The rise of pop-psychology: can it make your life better, or is it all snake-oil?

Guest Author • May 04, 2021

• Mental health,
• Psychology,
• self-help

Nick Haslam, The University of Melbourne   More than 50 years ago, George Miller, president of the American Psychological Association, urged his colleagues “to give psychology away”. No, cynical reader, he was not instructing his followers to abandon the field. Rather he hoped raising the general public’s awareness of psychology would help to solve society’s problems. In the half century … Read More

Side-Stepping Safeguards, Data Journalists Are Doing Science Now

Guest Author • May 01, 2021

• data analysis,
• data journalism,
• Science,
• science communication,
• statistics

By Irineo Cabreros News stories are increasingly told through data. Witness the Covid-19 time series that decorate the homepages of every major news outlet; the red and blue heat maps of polling predictions that dominate the runup to elections; the splashy, interactive plots that dance across the screen. As a statistician who handles data for a living, I … Read More