The Conversation

After our universe's cosmic dawn, what happened to all its original hydrogen?

Written by Aaron Parsons, Associate Professor of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley

Light from the universe's first galaxies destroyed the hydrogen atoms that formed during the Big Bang.NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team, CC BY

When our universe first blasted into existence with a Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago, it looked much different than it does today. Instead of planets, stars and galaxies, there was...

Beyond Olympic gold: US kids getting lapped in aerobic fitness

Written by Grant Tomkinson, Associate Professor, University of North Dakota

While the U.S. brings home more Olympic gold than any other country, many, if not most, American school kids wouldn’t even bring home a tin, if there were such a low-ranking medal.

Recently, colleagues and I set out to see how the fitness of American kids stacked up relative to other countries. Our findings were surprising. Not only did the...

Nobel prize-winning autophagy research laid groundwork for potential Parkinson's treatment

Written by Charbel Moussa, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Georgetown University

Autophagy lets neurons clear out harmful proteins. UCI Research via Flickr, CC BY-NC

Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on Oct. 3 “for his discoveries of the mechanisms for autophagy”, which is how cells “recycle” their contents. Autophagy is a quality control mechanism that destroys...

Why is taking photographs banned in many museums and historic places?

Written by Jay L. Zagorsky, Economist and Research Scientist, The Ohio State University

Have you ever pulled out your camera or phone in a museum or historic place and suddenly found a staff person telling you “no photographs”?

I was in London recently and it happened repeatedly in places like Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and Parliament.

The no-photos policy is not limited to just England but is a worldwide...

Columbus Day: Black legend meets White City

Written by William Francis Keegan, Professor of Anthropology, University of Florida

Agricultural Building at the Worlds Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1893.University of Maryland Digital Collections

The story of Christopher Columbus, as with all legends, involves a series of great successes and horrible failures.

Columbus’s current favorability rating hovers somewhere close to those of Hillary Clinton and...

What if nature, like corporations, had the rights and protections of a person?

Written by Chip Colwell, Lecturer on Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver

The forest around Lake Waikaremoana in New Zealand has been given legal status of a person because of its cultural significance.Paul Nelhams/flickr, CC BY-SA

In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. Following rulings in such cases as Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, U.S. law has established that...

Trump vs. Clinton: Three key moments from the second debate

Written by Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St Louis

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took the debate stage Sunday evening. We asked three scholars from the Washington University in St. Louis, where the debate was held, to pick a key quote from the evening and tell us why it was important.

Rebecca Wanzo

“This was locker room talk.” - Trump

Donald Trump defended the content of a video leaked...

Physicists explore exotic states of matter inspired by Nobel-winning research

Written by Nandini Trivedi, Professor of Physics, The Ohio State University

Things are kind of different on the quantum level.Nandini Trivedi, CC BY

The 2016 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, three theoretical physicists whose research used the unexpected mathematical lens of topology to investigate phases of matter and the transitions between them.

Topology is...

The curious history of the Nobel Peace Prize

Written by Richard Gunderman, Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

The news that Juan Manuel Santos of Columbia has received the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end his nation’s decades-old civil war is notable in part because the number of contenders for this year’s award set a new record. There were total of 376 nominees, 228 individuals and 148 organizations.

It also serves as an...

António Guterres to be the next UN Secretary-General: Good choice, bad process

Written by Adil Najam, Dean, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University

The next secretary-general of the United Nations, most everyone agreed, was supposed to be a woman. To be exact, a woman from Eastern Europe.

Now it is clear that it is going to be António Guterres, former prime minister of Portugal. Guterres is not from Eastern Europe. And he’s certainly not a woman.

Guterres is generally considered a...