We hear a lot these days about sea level rise spurred by climate change: The seas are rising, and that poses existential risks for coastal areas. What we don’t hear about — and what many people aren’t even aware is a real thing — is the rise and fall of the land. But drops in land elevation, known as “subsidence,” are very much real and affect large portions of the planet’s land masses, including in the United States. This weekend’s read is a report from scientists at Virginia Tech, United Nations University, and the U.S. Geological Survey on subsidence along the East Coast of the United States.
You may recall that in the summer of 2022 there was a global outbreak of mpox (originally called “monkeypox”). It spread rapidly across the United States, disproportionately impacting gay and bisexual men. At the time, many health experts expected it to follow the same pattern as COVID-19 (though not at the same scale): an initial outbreak that eventually started to subside, followed by further spikes as people let their guard down and stopped practicing good hygiene and other behaviors that help stem the spread of the disease. And then, last summer, mpox quietly fizzled out. This weekend’s read is an article penned by representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the White House, and the Brown University School of Public Health explaining why that happened, and the lessons learned by the public health community that helped them control the mpox outbreak. Those lessons are a counterpoint to what happened with COVID-19, and the positive outcome gives us hope that we can learn from our past mistakes.
This weekend’s read is a look at how U.S. surgeons have historically over-prescribed opioids to their patients to manage postoperative pain, and how that practice is changing for the better. Over the past several years, we have heard much about how pharmaceutical companies, such as Purdue, have aggressively marketed opioids to doctors, including downplaying their addictive properties, to increase sales. Those efforts largely succeeded and have led to an epidemic of people addicted to opioids — some of whom moved on to illicit street drugs, such as fentanyl, after their prescriptions ran out.
It’s certainly no secret that there is an epidemic of opioid-related substance abuse that is ravaging the United States, Canada, and many other countries around the world. But this weekend’s read is a research paper looking at the effectiveness of one attempt to deliver medical care to those who have been caught up in this epidemic.
This weekend’s read is a new scientific report in the journal Nature on a question that plagues many of us, especially during the holiday season: Why do some people get headaches from drinking red wine? It may surprise you to know that science currently doesn’t have a definitive answer to that question.
This weekend’s read is a report from three researchers at Seattle University’s Crime and Justice Research Center on the demographics of the people who serve on juries in Washington’s State courts.
This weekend’s read is an updated study from corporate consultant McKinsey & Company on Women in the Workplace, its ninth annual edition of the report. It drills down into the details of the “pipeline” for women to work their way up the corporate ladder and debunks four common myths on why women are underrepresented at higher management levels.
For this weekend’s read, we’re going to explore an idea at the intersection of biology and philosophy. It’s a paper written in 2017 by two biology researchers, one in the U.K. and the other in Brazil, that challenges our preconceived ideas about cognition and how we draw the boundary around the portion of our bodies that allows us to think.
This weekend’s read is a report published by the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) last month on a question that may be top of mind for a bunch of South Seattleites: How’s the West Seattle Bridge doing?
This weekend’s read is a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics looking at connections between drug overdose deaths and specific occupations and industries. Drug overdoses have skyrocketed over the past 10 years, largely because of the proliferation of synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl — synthetic opioids now account for about two-thirds of all overdoses in the United States — and also stimulants, such as methamphetamine.
