April 2018

Could oysters be the new corals of climate conservation?

“Scientists Announce That The Great Barrier Reef Is Officially Terminal.” This is the jarring headline for a recent article citing some of Australia's top coral researchers on the realities of one of the world's most coveted natural systems. This type of prognosis has become eerily familiar in recent years as we've learned about the resounding

Science in your Laundry Detergent

When I was a kid, if I got a grass stain or a blood stain on my clothes it was probably not coming out no matter how much presoaking and hand scrubbing was involved. Nowadays, if I get food on my clothes, I admonish myself for being clumsy then throw it in the wash with some liquid detergent and hope that it magically comes out looking new. It still amazes me that it usually does. How have laundry detergents improved their cleaning efficacy so much in just the last few decades?

The EDGES Story: How Scientists Detected Effects of Light from the First Stars

In March 2018, a team of scientists led by Judd Bowman from Arizona State's School of Earth and Space Exploration and Alan Rogers from MIT's Haystack Observatory has done what many thought to be an impossible task. With a small radio antenna called EDGES (Experiment to Detect the Global Epoch of Recombination Signature) placed in

W(H+)AT’S IN YOUR WATER, ATHENS?

Cover photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/121935927@N06/13579500953/ Water is something we all use every day in Athens. We shower with it, brush our teeth with it, water our gardens with it, and of course, we drink our tap water, too. Most of us don’t even think twice about taking a drink from our taps, but at the same time,

Troubling the Water

On August 31, 1854, an outbreak of cholera occurred along Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in London. Over the next three days, 127 people living in the area died; the count rose to 500 a week later. Most of the nearby residents fled the area, fearing they would also be infected. Instead of fleeing with them,

Tired ‘Round the (Circadian) Clock

Everyone knows what it's like to feel tired. If you're a student, you probably know what it means to feel completely exhausted. You likely could also pinpoint exactly why you are exhausted – you stayed up cramming all night for that big test, or just couldn't turn off Netflix even though you had class early

2017-2018 Monarch Numbers Down: A Battle on Two Fronts

This year's overwintering monarch butterfly population experienced a 14.77% decrease from the previous winter, following the trend of steady decline observed over the past two decades. These overwintering monarchs represent the individuals that survived the long-distance migration from as far north as Canada all the way down to Mexico. Causes of Decline There are several

ER = EPR

Einstein is known for reshaping our conception of space and time and showing that this involved a re-imagining of gravity. This set the stage for the field of General Relativity, a field of physics that is still vigorously researched today. This only scratches the surface as to his contributions. He, for example, was the first

Six Hours Until Sunrise and a Binder Full of Notes

Sleep deprivation is something everyone has experienced. We spend a third of our lives snoozing, or we should. Occasionally, we procrastinate or misjudge how long something is going to take, turning what should be a chance for the various functions of your body to reset and undergo maintenance into a productivity marathon.

Detoxifying the mystery of an underrated organ

We're a few months into the new year now, so how's that “New Year, New You” life plan going? More specifically, how about those detoxes or cleanses? You may have noticed a few detox trends on the covers of magazines while buying organic veggies for your vegan meals (which may or may not have turned

Texan Panthers to the (Genetic) Rescue

Once upon a time, thousands of panthers roamed throughout the North American continent. Puma concolor are a highly adaptive species that inhabited a variety of habitat types. However, within 200 years after European colonization, they were eliminated from the entire eastern half of North America due to hunting and habitat loss. All that remained was

Innovation in Education: How Virtual Reality is Transforming the Classroom

It is a blazing hot summer day in August of 2014, and I am a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman at the University of Georgia about to attend my very first college class. The class is Introductory Physics, a fundamental course for an engineering major such as myself. Fast forward to a month later, however, and I

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