The Conversation

As scientists, my colleagues and I are often told we need to engage the general public and decision makers, to use our expertise to inform public discourse and debates and to reach a far wider audience than just our professional colleagues.I very much believe in the importance of doing this. This is, for instance, my 25th article for The Conversation. I’ve also written scores of articles for other popular venues such as New Scientist, Natural History, Yale Environment 360, Australian Geographic, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times, among others.

A growing body of advice suggests doing small amounts of moderate exercise can make a significant difference to your health.

As a tenured professor and mother of four young sons, I am constantly asked, “How do you do it?” What people mean is: “How can you have a full-time job and still manage child care and housework?”I usually respond, “High-quality husband and high-quality child care, in that order.” From the outset, my husband, a full-time, clinical pharmacist, has been a committed partner in caring for our house and raising our children.But I’ve learned that, with our equal division of housework and child care, he’s an outlier. There may be some like him, but our research group at The Ohio State University recently discovered that such husbands in dual-earner households are, indeed, rare.

Virtual reality (VR) equipment has tended to be cumbersome and expensive, all heavy headsets and awkward gloves. Until recently it’s been beyond the reach of the home consumer, but with the appearance of Oculus Rift (since bought by Facebook), Microsoft’s HoloLens, and even DIY options such as Google Cardboard, it seems VR is coming to a living room near you soon.

Since the Great Recession ended in 2009, the recovery in jobs has lagged behind that of Corporate America.Corporate profits and business purchases of equipment and software returned to or near records within a year, yet unemployment remained stubbornly high – even though hiring usually tracks spending. Even today, with joblessness at 5.7%, the labor force participation rate has declined to 63% from 67% before the recession, signaling many adults have simply quit looking for work. And in many parts of the US, unemployment remains elevated.

There has been excitement among researchers in recent years that playing certain video and computer games may strengthen core components of cognition, helping us to make quicker decisions, think more fluidly, and avoid harmful distractions.

Two women recently had their research paper rejected by a science journal based on an incredibly sexist review of their work – an event that has caused outrage on social media. While the journal, PLOS ONE, has apologized and given the authors a second chance, not everyone is as lucky.The case provides an opportunity for journals to adopt an open peer-review system – a process in which scientists evaluate the quality of other scientists' work – so that reviewers cannot hide behind anonymity. But it also shows it is time to get tough on the widespread biases in universities.

We all know how irritating it is to have an inbox flooded with junk mail. Fortunately email providers these days contain filters to keep the junk mail at bay. As a result the junk mail folder tends to pile up with never-to-be-read emails.But, occasionally, an important email is snagged by the filter and is unduly ignored.We can think of the human genome as a server sending out a constant bombardment of emails. These messages are on average 2,000 letters long, and these “letters” are made up of different types of bases, some of which are packaged in the form of RNA.

Even before Jacqueline Ho enrolled in her first environmental studies course at college, her thinking about climate change had been shaped during her years growing up in Singapore reading books by the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben.At college, ideas first planted by McKibben were reinforced in courses where she read classics by Aldo Leopold and Garrett Hardin, along with recent books by Van Jones and Elizabeth Kolbert.With these authors anchoring her understanding, it was easy for Ho to believe about climate change “that fossil fuel corporations were to blame, that we had a suite of low-carbon technologies we could deploy immediately, and that grassroots solutions held promise,” she recalls.

The latest article exploring sexism in academia suggests that it no longer exists. Some have already grumbled about flaws in the study’s design. But more than that, I simply don’t believe the finding because there is clear evidence that sexism still exists.

Infertility is becoming a public health issue in Europe. Declining birth rates over the past 50 years mean that Europe is only producing 1.6 children per woman – hardly satisfactory to compete on the global stage against increasing populations of fit and able youth from the emerging economies of India and China. And the problem is getting worse: couples reporting infertility in centers across Europe is increasing by 8-9% annually.

There is bad news for those planning to go to Mars in the near future: a study in mice has suggested that radiation in space could cause cognitive decline in astronauts. However, we know from past research that mental, social and physical exercise can boost cognitive functions. With planned Mars missions moving ever closer, it might be be worth exploring activity as a way to counter radiation damage.