The Conversation

Fine particle air pollution is a public health emergency hiding in plain sight

Written by Douglas Brugge, Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine, Tufts University

A Kosovo policeman directs cars in Pristina after the government banned traffic in response to extremely high fine particle pollution levels, Jan. 31, 2018.AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu

Ambient air pollution is the largest environmental health problem in the United States and in the world more generally. Fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 millionths...

3 ways the women's movement in US politics is misunderstood

Written by Deana Rohlinger, Professor of Sociology, Florida State University

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey after winning the election.AP Photo/Butch Dill

A record number of women are headed to statehouses and Capitol Hill in 2019. One hundred women were elected to the U.S. House, which means that at least 121 women will serve in the 116th Congress – up from the current 107.

Twelve women were elected to the U.S. Senate. This...

Why politicians are the real winners in Amazon's HQ2 bidding war

Written by Nathan Jensen, Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin

For cities that lost like New Jersey, there may be more than one way to win.AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Now that Amazon has announced the winners of its competition to host its second headquarters, a question on many minds is whether it’ll be worth the incentives offered.

We have a different question: Why did so many cities play Amazon’s...

Hay una solución sencilla a la falta de sueño de los jóvenes

Written by Adriana Galván, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

Una buena noche de sueño se reduce a tener un lugar cómodo donde apoyar la cabeza.Marisa Harris/Unsplash, CC BY

Los neurocientíficos han lanzado el siguiente mensaje: un sueño sano es sinónimo de un cerebro sano.

Pero no es tan fácil identificar qué hacer para mejorar el sueño. Algunos padres...

A county in Idaho offered Spanish-language ballots for the first time and here's what happened

Written by Gabe Osterhout, Research Associate, Idaho Policy Institute, Boise State University

On the morning of Election Day, the top trending search on Google was “donde votar,” which means “where to vote” in Spanish.

Voter access to the polls was a major issue during the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S. Charges of voter suppression were made in in Georgia and North Dakota. Critics of new voting rules claimed they...

Craigslist can cut solid waste, one used sofa at a time

Written by Suvrat Dhanorkar, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain Management, Pennsylvania State University

Trash or treasure?trekandshoot/Shutterstock.com

The average American generates about 1,500 pounds of garbage annually, and then spends lots of tax dollars disposing of it.

Even as recycling has taken off across the country in recent decades, the volume of all this trash has kept growing – albeit at a slower pace.

Since I research how people...

From bicycle to social movements, the changing role of chaplains in the US

Written by Wendy Cadge, Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University

'Protest chaplains' came together to pledge their support to the Occupy Wall Street protests at Judson Memorial Church in New York in 2011.AP Photo/Andrew Burton

More and more institutions across the United States are hiring chaplains and other spiritual care providers. Some are places that have long employed chaplains, but others may come as a...

Partial mycoheterotrophs: The green plants that feed on fungi

Written by Nicole Hynson, Associate Professor of Botany, University of Hawaii

Some sneaky plants steal food instead of exclusively making their own.Charlie Jackson/flickr, CC BY

You probably learned this basic lesson of biology in elementary school: Plants are self-feeders. These so-called autotrophs use the sun’s energy and water to turn carbon dioxide from the air into food through the process known as...

Skipping a few thousand years: Rapid domestication of the groundcherry using gene editing

Written by Nathan T. Reem, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell University

These fresh vegetables and fruits are the result of hundreds to thousands of years of plant breeding and selection. Irina Sokolovskaya / Shutterstock.com

Shopping in your supermarket’s produce section is like strolling through a museum of humanity’s greatest inventions. Perfect ears of golden sweet corn; tomatoes of different sizes,...

The counties where the anti-vaccine movement thrives in the US

Written by Peter J Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology, Baylor College of Medicine

Thanks to nonmedical exemptions, vaccination rates are falling in some states.Zodiacphoto/shutterstock.com

As a pediatrician-scientist who develops new vaccines for neglected diseases, I spent most of my career in the Boston-Washington, D.C. corridor.

While working in the Northeast, I had heard a few things about the anti-vaccine movement. As both...