Opinion

Opinion: Physician perception of ‘female hysteria’ is alive and well

Many have heard of the term “female hysteria,” a pejorative, outdated, catch-all term that refers to any complaints a female has about their health. The implication in this so-called diagnosis is that the health concerns are invented in the patient’s head. Symptoms attributed to female hysteria have varied throughout history, from anxiety and tremors to […]

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Opinion: The odyssey of medical training and how burnout can lead to tragedy

Most people know that doctors must complete residency as part of their medical training, but have you ever wondered where the term originates? The origin of the term dates back to the late 1800s and early 1900s when residents were actually required to live at the hospitals in which they worked. In other words, from

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Opinion: Climate change, the Anthropocene, and the Plantationocene

As we grapple with the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, some scientists and researchers have tried to nominalize the cause of today’s environmental degradation. The term “Anthropocene” has been used to emphasize humanity’s impact on the environment, suggesting that humans are the major force of environmental change in this geological epoch. In 2016, the Anthropocene

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Opinion: The need to tackle bias in the sphere of artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the greatest advancements humans have developed to date, has the power to augment the growth of healthcare, education, media, and job training — as well as physical and mental health. However, AI cannot ultimately improve any of these areas if the supporting data encodes biases in race, gender, and ethnicity.

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Opinion: How research about culture and the brain runs into racism and the importance of cross-disciplinary communication

Academics mostly keep to themselves. They stay in their offices or labs, and they venture out to classrooms or conferences with (hopefully) interested audiences and other people who understand their passions and frustrations. They spend months or years collecting evidence and formulating theories to be able to share them with their colleagues and advance the

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Opinion: The search for the magnetic monopole & physicists’ obsession with Symmetry

At the end of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell condensed centuries of work in the study of electricity and magnetism into four eloquent and simple equations. Maxwell’s equations describe electric and magnetic fields as a yin and yang, ebbing and flowing through space. A change in one field creates a swirl in the other,

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