Non-English Languages Lack the Words for Talking About Te...

By the early 19th century, just three—French, English, and German—accounted for the bulk of scientists’ communication and published research; by the second half of the 20th century, only English remained dominant as the U.S. strengthened its place in the world, and its influence in the global scientific community has continued to increase ever since. As a consequence, the scientific vocabularies of many languages have failed to keep pace with new developments and discoveries. In many l...

 If a Harvard Degree is So Valuable, Why Not Franchise It?

But what if higher education is really just the final stage of a competitive tournament? From grades and test results through the U.S. News & World Report rankings of the colleges themselves, higher education sorts us all into a hierarchy. Kids at the top enjoy prestige because they’ve defeated everybody else in a competition to reach the schools that proudly exclude the most people. All the hard work at Harvard is done by the admissions officers who anoint an already-proven hypercompet...

 PhDs Lack Skills for Surviving Outside Academia

Inefficiency arises from the fact that substantial resources have been invested in training these scientists and engineers. The trained have foregone other careers – and the salary that they would have earned – along the way. The public has invested resources in tuition and stipends. If these ‘investments’ are then forced to enter careers that require less training, resources have not been efficiently deployed. Surely there are less expensive ways to train high school science teachers...

 Law School is a Cash Cow

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure. [...] IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey inform...

 Professors Come from a Select Few Universities

The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.” This study follows the discovery by political s...

 Using City Sewage to Survey a City's Microbiome

The team gathered samples over the course of a year from sewage treatment plants in 71 different cities in 31 states, chosen for their geographic spread and range of obesity rates. The leanest city sampled was Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with an obesity rate of 13.5 percent, while the heaviest was St. Joseph, Missouri, with a rate of 37.4 percent. Bacteria from human waste make up just a small proportion of the bacteria found in sewage. But using DNA sequencing, the researchers could identi...

 The Northeast Megalopolis

The megalopolis encompasses the District of Columbia and part or all of 11 states: from south to north, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. It is linked by Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 1, which start in Miami and Key West, Florida, respectively, and terminate in Maine at the Canada–United States border, as well as the Northeast Corridor railway line, the busiest passenger rail line in the count...

 Religious Organizations Must have Connections to the Secu...

Science, with its naturalistic approach to understanding the empirical world, has become the dominant standard against which alternative systems of knowledge production must argue. Over the course of the twentieth century, some denominations have reconciled particular truths of Christianity and science. However, fundamentalist Protestant Christians in the U.S. continue to wrestle with contradictions between their literal interpretations of the Bible and alternative cosmologies produced throug...

 Simultaneous Invention

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. What if he had never been born, Would we still have light bulbs? And would they still have been invented in 1879? It turns out that this is not just a philosophical question and the answer is yes, the light bulb would have been invented at roughly the same time. We know this because at least 23 other people built prototype light bulbs before Edison1, including two groups who filed patents and fought legal battles with him over the rights (Sawyer ...

 Chemical Cognitive Enhancers

Pharmaceutical amphetamines (such as Adderall and Ritalin) These drugs have been used withouit a prescription, for their tirednessreducing and concentration-enhancing effects, by about 5% of students in U.S. colleges, according to a recent study, with some colleges reporting rates as high as 25%. Modafinil Modafinil is a nonamphetamine stimulant, marketed to help people with narcolepsy stay awake. It has been reported as popular with otherwise healthy individuals who are using it to mai...