What is the microbiome?
Like it or not, your body is teeming with trillions of bugs — microbial cells, that is. Thinking about these bacteria and other microorganisms that you host both outside and inside your body might leave you feeling queasy, but they’re actually critical to maintaining your health, from your weight to your mood.
Although the Boston Marathon bombing took place several years ago — on April 15, 2013 — the event’s reverberations continue to be felt by families and citizens in the city and across the globe. It has also become an event much studied by researchers, as it provided unique insight into how a 21st-century city might respond to an urban disaster in real time.
Sandy Hook, Aurora, the Washington Navy Yard, Fort Hood, and Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. These place names signify terrible tragedies that continue to prompt deep reflection from policymakers and the public about how to stop acts of mass violence in the United States.
Each year, as flu season approaches, many of us offer up our arms for a quick pinch, hoping to stay healthy during the winter ahead. The annual influenza vaccine protects against a few strains of the disease that experts at the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) predict will be most common that season.
Physician-assisted suicide is legal in only two U.S. states, yet requests to doctors for such help remain common across the country. As the 2012 PBS Frontline documentary “The Suicide Plan” notes, there is an “underground world” that has “added new layers of moral and legal complexity to one of the most polarizing issues in America.”
As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, education leaders are pushing for greater diversity among public school teachers. A growing body of research suggests children benefit in many ways from having a teacher of the same race or ethnicity. Published studies, for example, suggest black students do better in reading and math and are less likely to be suspended from school when they have black teachers.
