Students arriving at Swarthmore for the first time are in the middle of one of the annual challenges to newcomers here: figuring out just what their high school education means now that they’ve come to college. Many students arrive having taken AP
After the tragic Boston Marathon bombings last week, the Internet was abuzz with tweeters, bloggers, and posters filling cyberspace with information. Like many recent world events, the social media response to the bombings became a part of their story. Links to news
The past few decades have shown tremendous growth in scientists in all scientific disciplines, and has spread through some of the world’s developing nations as well. Countries such as Brazil, China, Mexico and Malaysia have made great strides towards making science and
Let’s imagine for a moment we had the technology to recreate a species once considered extinct. Imagine that we could use the genetic information from those organisms’ DNA to create new individuals that have not roamed the earths for generations. Consider what
An amazing piece of news this past week has been the announcement of a breakthrough in HIV treatment: a two-and-a-half year old girl from Mississippi has been declared “functionally cured” of HIV, after being diagnosed with the retrovirus at birth. The child,
This weekend, Swarthmore will play host to a nationwide conference of students from colleges and universities from over 18 states interested in discussing tactics of an emerging movement to divest college endowments from extractive industries, namely coal, oil and gas. There are
Last week featured the biggest American sporting event of the year, the National Football League’s Super Bowl. For anyone who had been following the news coming to light the weeks leading up to the big game, an uncharacteristic black cloud seemed to
This year’s flu season has struck early, and influenza is now widespread in 47 US states. According to the Center for Disease control, this year’s flu reached levels of an epidemic in the second week in January, meaning that flu was responsible
The Internet is opening up new ways of sharing information on a mass scale all the time. This means scientists can share with others in many ways unthought of before, from blogging and personal web pages about their work, to contributing their
The night after Election Day, Jon Stewart proudly boasted he had the winner of the 2012 election that night. His guest was Nate Silver, the man who had done the not-so-unthinkable: correctly predicting the presidential election and all but one congressional election