Many prominent figures in the past have called many to action about the pressing concerns of their time, and the same thing can be said for this generation.

"We are the first generation to witness and experience the problems we ourselves created and we may very well be the last to do something about it" is the common rhetoric to direct our attention to an issue that has worldwide repercussions and incite us to do something about it.

Here are a few excerpts from history in which this has been used:

From W.R. Barnhart,

We are the first generation that can completely destroy ourselves. At the close of the First World War the younger generation was called the lost generation. If our present younger generation should be another lost generation it may be the last generation.

And former Seattle Mayor Michael Patrick,

The impacts of climate change are real, we are experiencing them today and they will continue to worsen. We’re the first generation to see the effects of climate change, and the last generation who can do anything about it. To refuse to use every tool at our disposal in this fight — to embrace inaction — is to endorse a trajectory that will lead to suffering, privation, and calamity.

It has a certain ring to it. If you think about it a bit more deeply, the generations from the past century until today might truly be the ones who will be the undoing of humanity. Has there ever been a period in history wherein the things that humans create could cause so much destruction in the blink of an eye?

Well, one might say that humans have been the undoing of humans since time immemorial with all the strife and wars that have been waged. But our instruments of warfare and progress as well as the cumulative effects of the things we did to get them are now being felt. We are probably racing against time at this point. It might seem inevitable. Unless we do something about it.

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Let me start out by saying that doctors are humans too. They may have the skills and the technical know-how to save multiple people's lives, but they too have their own limits.

And with the demanding environment in the medical field today, the rate of burnout on professionals in the medical field might continue to increase and impact the overall effectiveness of the health care system.

A great deal of ink has been spilled on the causes of burnout and the reasons for its rapidly increasing prevalence. But if you look at the underlying currents that shape the ways health care has changed in recent decades, there is one persistent trend. This trend is a plausible contender for the biggest cause of increased burnout: the dramatic fall in physician autonomy.

Hectic sixteen-hour shifts (at least) put a lot of pressure on doctors to accomplish their tasks and with the kinds of restrictions and procedures that they need to abide by, doctors have less control over how they do their job.

But if that were the case, why don't we see any changes to the current system? Why don't doctors simply demand for better schedules or more autonomy? Well, the reason is pretty simple. They are "supposed" to be selfless and not care about their personal interests over the greater good of the public.

No one thinks very highly of the doctor who objects to a quality improvement project on the grounds that it reduces her independence. We’re all supposed to focus on the quality of the care we provide, and if the best way to improve care is to reduce autonomy, that’s a trade we should all be happy to make. At some point, though, reductions in autonomy negatively impact care.

If the people we go to and consult about our physical ailments themselves are not able to take care of their health, how can we expect them to provide the care that we need? Doctors are humans too. They need to be treated as such.

(Image credit: Doximity)

It's the end of an era. Endgame marks the close of the Infinity Saga, tying up all significant narratives from where the whole storyline began back in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie. But that doesn't mean that our heroes will be able to sit back and live easy.

We all know that the MCU has a phase four and there's even one more movie to cap phase three which is Spiderman: Far From Home, most likely giving us a sneak peek into what phase four holds but there are certain information on what we can expect for the next chapter of this epic franchise.

“The slate that we’re building over the next five years [is] not apples to apples,” said Feige to io9. “It is two very distinct things and I hope they’ll feel very distinct.”

New to the Marvel Cinematic Universe this time around is an extra focus on the tie-in television shows that will air on Disney Plus. While the Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and the like) and Agents of SHIELD technically were set in the same universe, the Disney Plus shows will actually center on the movie characters that we know.

Apart from the sequels that have been reported to come out in the next several years, there are some new players coming into the scene. For a list of all the possible upcoming Marvel movies that will form the new slate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, check them out on Polygon.

(Image credit: Marvel, Marvel Studios/IMDb)

Amidst several stories about Tesla breaking into the news, the tech company has reportedly sent an email to employees warning them about the confidentiality agreements that they signed and the measures that the company will take if any employee were to be caught leaking to the press.

For Tesla, the leaks overshadow some of its recent contributions to the electric vehicle space, including the progress made on automated manufacturing and the solar roof at its Sparks, Nevada battery plant and Musk’s promise during a recent investor call that Tesla will be a driverless car company worth $500 billion in the near future.

The leaks also come at a bad time for Musk and Tesla. The company is currently looking to raise cash. Reports indicate that Tesla seeks to raise $650 million in equity and $1.35 billion in convertible bonds. Corporate filings indicate that the company intends to use the cash as a sort of buffer, in case demand weakens or we enter a recession.

You may check out a copy of the email on The Next Web.

(Image credit: JD Lasica/Flickr)

We may have asteroids whizzing past us but there are no imminent threats of any big space rock coming our way. Not yet, at least. Still, it's better to be prepared and just recently, the Planetary Defense Conference concluded, and various space agencies will be conducting simulations on what to do or how to respond when an asteroid alert starts buzzing.

This year, the simulated situation is dire. The story starts in March when scientists discover a near-Earth asteroid that’s estimated to be between 330 to 1,000 feet wide. The asteroid, dubbed 2019 PDC, is expected to pass by Earth on May 13th at a safe distance of 12 million miles. But after following 2019 PDC’s trajectory for a couple of weeks, the fictional scientists initially determine that the asteroid will swing back by Earth again in 2027. And when it does, the rock has a 1 percent chance of slamming into the planet.

Though one percent seems like negligible, we cannot deny the fact that it is probable. Furthermore, there are various other factors that might tip the scales against us, so what will we do in the case a giant asteroid is coming to hit us to oblivion?

One option is to create spacecraft that could rendezvous with the asteroid and ram into it, changing the object’s speed and direction so that it will most likely miss Earth. “That would be enough to make it miss the Earth, if it was done years ahead,” says Chodas. NASA is already working on a real mission that would test out this process in space. It’s called the Double Asteroid Redirect Mission (DART), and it will slam into a small asteroid moon, an object that orbits around another asteroid. It’s supposed to launch in 2022.

Even then, we aren't sure that the impact would be big enough to send that asteroid flying elsewhere or even destroying it completely. Thankfully, there are no threats like that yet. If only we had a band of superheroes who would save us average people from sure destruction, whether it be an asteroid impact or an alien invasion, then we could rest easy.

(Image credit: Pixabay)

In any movie, there will always be the big stars whose names get plastered on the posters and the movie screen but there are those silent characters with minor roles that we can still grow to love. In the above photo, we see C-3PO meeting E-3PO in Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back. There are many other minor characters throughout the whole Star Wars franchise. Popular Mechanics' Darren Orf lists the best minor characters in Star Wars here.

(Image credit: Lucasfilm; Darth Culator/Wookieepedia/Fandom)

Not to mention, it will be on April 13, 2029, a Friday. A near apocalyptic miss on the asteroid's part there but it will be very close to Earth for a short period of time, just enough for us to see its 1,000-foot wide mass grazing some of our satellites and barely scraping the outer edges of the Earth's atmosphere.

That asteroid, called Apophis, stretches about 1,100 feet (340 meters) across and will pass within 19,000 miles (31,000 kilometers) of Earth's surface. That might sound scary, but scientists are positive that it will not hit Earth. Instead, it's a once-in-a-lifetime chance for scientists to truly understand asteroids near Earth.

"The excitement is that an object this large comes this close about once per thousand years, so it's all about, What's the opportunity?" Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at MIT, said yesterday (April 30) during the International Academy of Aeronautics' Planetary Defense Conference, which is being held here this week. The asteroid's proximity and size will also add to the encounter's brightness, so Apophis will capture eyeballs — about 2 billion people should be able to see it pass by with their naked eyes, he said.

Hopefully, we will be some of the lucky ones to see the asteroid in its full splendor. On another note, a few key point that scientists have been discussing are how the Earth's gravitational pull as well as the sun's radiation (called Yarkovsky effect) will affect Apophis' orbit.

That phenomenon, called the Yarkovsky effect, results from the temperature differential between the day and night sides of the asteroid. The tweaks the Yarkovsky effect cause in an asteroid's orbit are so small that scientists struggle to distinguish the nudges from instrument hiccups. 

Although scientists have pinpointed Apophis' trajectory in 2029 to within a path just 7.4 miles (12 km) wide that stays thousands of miles away from Earth, they can't quite rule out possible impacts decades in the future — and that's in part because of uncertainty about the Yarkovsky effect.

Other ideas of using this opportunity to further study asteroids have also been popping up. Some even suggest putting a seismometer on Apophis like what previous missions such as the Mars InSight did or sending a probe to explore it like what Hayabusa2 did on the asteroid Ryugu.

Whatever scientists do in response to this opportunity or phenomenon, I'm just grateful that we will live to see it and not have to run in panic and find shelter before the big asteroid blows our Earth to smithereens. The rest is up to the planetary defense teams and asteroid experts.

-via Popular Mechanics

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

We don't have a cure for HIV yet but a study has found that by using antiretroviral treatments (ART), the spread of the virus could be suppressed to effectively zero transmissions.

Researchers involved in the massive study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, believe this could be the definitive study on whether current antiretroviral drugs are effective at stopping HIV.

The research studied around 1,000 couples with one being HIV-positive and the other negative. Throughout eight years of the study, not one was infected with the virus. There were some who got infected but that was due to extraneous factors, that is, they contracted the virus from HIV-positive people who didn't take antiretroviral drugs.

Such conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of the drugs “is necessary to promote the benefits of early testing and treatment and to tackle stigma, discrimination, and criminalisation laws that continue to affect HIV-positive people,” the authors wrote.

The Lancet provided a formal comment on the study from Myron Cohen, a physician with the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. These important findings, he said, should “serve to inspire and challenge us” to overcome the roadblocks that prevent HIV-positive people from receiving treatment.

The full study has been published on The Lancet.

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Children who suffer strokes as infants often go on with their lives having certain impairments that go unnoticed. With the help of a wristwatch-like motion-tracking device, these impairments can be detected long before they cause any irreversible damage.

“I had a teenager come into my clinic because he was trying on gloves at a sporting-goods store, and the store owner noticed he was struggling to put his baseball glove on,” says senior author Nico Dosenbach, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis, who sees patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

“They thought he’d hurt his elbow playing baseball. But it turned out he’d had a massive stroke as an infant that damaged the motor parts of his brain, and no one had ever noticed until the store owner said something. I sent him to therapy, but he had only partial recovery. Perhaps if we’d sent him to therapy when he was a toddler instead of a teenager, it might have made a bigger difference.”

Researchers wanted to eliminate the difficulty of detecting these impairments so they developed an algorithm that would take the data gathered by the device to see whether there is a significantly disproportionate ratio between using their left and right arm, which would signal possible motor impairments.

“Many of the children with impairments used one arm only 60 to 80 percent as much as the other, which is really abnormal,” says Dosenbach, who is also an assistant professor of occupational therapy and of pediatrics. “Even that level of impairment is not always easy for a pediatrician to detect, because children often behave totally differently in the doctor’s office than they do normally.”

Hopefully the device can aid pediatricians and others to promptly address these issues before they become a part of children's lives until they grow old.

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As the number of men who work in the kitchen, cooking food and making a living out of it, the language surrounding the activity has changed. From being a chore or drudgery, it is now being seen and discussed as a technical practice. 

But the thing is, it has always been that way. Women just aren't credited or celebrated for the daily grind of preparing meals for their families, the private sphere, whereas male chefs boast about their latest new creation or mastery of such and such technique, and get lauded for it in the public sphere.

The trend of men cooking at home is one that’s been growing for a while, and a lot of it is undeniably positive. But “more time” doesn’t mean “equal time.” Either way, it’s clear that getting men onboard with domestic drudgery required a complete change to the discourse.

According to Onstad, “masculine power” lent credibility to the job, which would ultimately lead to the rise of the male restaurant chef. “In public, men were lauded for the craft of cooking, while private food preparation in the family kitchen remained mostly unheralded women’s work,” writes Onstad. 

Cooking then became acceptable for men in the context of a technical set of tasks, rewarded with a salary, rather than a form of obligatory nurturing within the home. And that’s how it stayed for some time: Men gained prestige running restaurant kitchens while women silently fed the children.

Making cooking a more technically-oriented task doesn't fix the issue however, as the concept of cooking didn't really need this makeover. Rather, the root of the issue is that though cooking may be an art form, it's still painstaking labor and if you have to do it every single day, it becomes a burden that hopefully, men would be able to share equitably.

(Image credit: Maarten van den Heuvel/Unsplash)

Much of what we know about the known universe were all gathered through a lot of testing and theorizing, doing the scientific method with diligence and creativity, thinking outside the box to put the pieces together so that they fit nicely thus allowing us to get a good picture of what happens, how exactly it happens, and why.

One of these things that we believe to be the case from observation and inference is gene expression. We know that genes get replicated, transcribed, and translated. But there are questions to which we won't have definite answers without actually seeing the process.

Back then, we didn't really have sophisticated tools to peer through the genetic landscape and observe how it happens. However, scientists have, for the first time, witnessed one of the basic events in biology: the act of turning on a gene.

The video, reported last year, is fuzzy and a few seconds long, but it wowed the scientists who saw it. For the first time, they were witnessing details of an early step — long unseen, just cleverly inferred — in a central event in biology: the act of turning on a gene. Those blue and green blobs were two key bits of DNA called an enhancer and a promoter (labeled to fluoresce). When they touched, a gene powered up, as revealed by bursts of red.

-via The Scientist

(Image credit: The Digital Artist/Pixabay)

(Video credit: Knowable Mag)

What defines us living organisms? The question is an important one to ponder since we are making rapid progress into AI territory and synthetic bioengineering such that the lines between living and inanimate may become blurry but not at all completely dissipated.

There are still distinguishing features between humans and other living organisms to those that are artificial at their core. Even when robots, which have the capacity to read human emotions, are being developed, there is still something at the back of our minds making us to take a step back before plastering a label on them saying that they're "living".

Two scientists, John D. Loike and Robert Pollack, discuss this issue on how "life" and "living" should be defined in scientific terms. We can't simply have things that can think and feel as our basis for what "life" or "living organisms" should be. They propose a concise definition that encapsulates the conditions that make an organism a "living" one.

For natural selection to have generated such a diversity of living things on earth, time and the mortality of every individual organism to assure the future survival of species are both required. 

We propose a simple but challenging definition of life as the property of an organism that possesses any genetic code that allows for reproduction, natural selection, and individual mortality.

Would you agree with their definition?

(Image credit: Franck V./Unsplash)

Various natural processes in the environment work together in synergy to keep the flow of life intact. The natural order maintains the balance that holds ecosystems together. Each one in the chain gives and receives in return from the cycles that occur in nature.

Here, we feature hippos and how they stabilize the movement of silicon in the East African environment. They do this by eating grass rich in silicon and then excrete it into the river.

A team led by biologist Jonas Schoelynck of the University of Antwerp in Belgium tracked silicon moving through Kenya’s Mara River, a hippo hangout, by analyzing ratios of two silicon isotopes — versions of the element with different masses — in grasses, hippo feces, soil and waters.

The team found that hippos play an outsized role in cycling silicon through the local ecosystem. Hippos grazing on grasses in the savanna can consume about 800 kilograms of silicon daily through the plants. As a hippo lingers in the water, it can excrete about half of the silicon it consumed. All told, the animals “pumped” 0.4 metric tons of silicon from the grasslands into the Mara River daily, increasing the total amount of silicon measured in the water by more than 76 percent, the team estimates.

Now, of course, we also need to consider the conservation status of the hippos in East Africa. We now know the importance of hippos in keeping the balance of the ecosystem. Many plants and animals depend on these nutrients and if the hippos were to suddenly disappear, that will upset the delicate balance, and wreck the ecological structure.

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It's official. In California, May the Fourth is now Star Wars Day. All of this coincides with the opening of the new Galaxy's Edge area in Disneyland Park at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California.

According to the resolution text, the city of Anaheim (where Disneyland is located) will enjoy an added $14 million in tax revenue per year as a result of the upcoming theme park, which also created over 5,000 temporary jobs and over 1,000 permanent ones. The Disneyland location of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge opens its doors May 31; the Disney World location in Orlando, meanwhile, goes live on Aug. 29.

(Image credit: Lucasfilm/IMDb)

Controlling disease-carrying pests is a taxing, labor-intensive, expensive, and highly complicated process the results of which aren't always effective in reducing the population. In fact, fighting mosquitoes with more mosquitoes was already tried before.

Now, there is a new method that scientists say might tackle the root of the problem. By producing mosquito larvae that cannibalize other larvae in a pool, it would hopefully reduce the numbers.

Instead of raising killer mosquitoes all together in batches, which has been the practice and inefficient, the Texas researchers, led by Anita Schiller, director of mosquito bio-control development at Harris County’s Biological Control Initiative, increased production by rearing them individually. Although it may sound labor intensive, the researchers say their method is more efficient because, when reared all together (the old way) Tx. rutilus larvae cannibalize one another, sharply reducing the output.

Larval Tx. rutilus voraciously hunt and gorge on the larvae of disease-vector mosquitoes sharing the same water. One of them can consume up to 5,000 prey larvae before it matures, which can take several weeks to six months. While the larvae are fierce cannibals, Tx. rutilus adults—large mosquitoes with a wingspan of almost half an inch and legs that would overlap a U.S. quarter—feed peaceably on nectar from flowers. They need sugars from nectar to produce eggs.

Of course, there are other factors that need to be considered such as mosquitoes' behavior, subsequent reproduction, as well as extraneous factors like Hurricane Harvey which wrecked the research facility where the mosquitoes were being bred and so they had to do a repeat study.

Still, if this proves to be effective, we may have a chance to finally contain diseases like dengue fever, malaria, Zika, and chikungunya.

(Image credit: Jeny/Pixabay)