Technology

Feeding the Future: Climate Change and Declining Farm Productivity
Biology, Technology

Feeding the Future: Climate Change and Declining Farm Productivity

By Jeanne Kosciusko-Morizet Despite significant improvements in agriculture over the past sixty years, a Cornell study reveals that climate change has lowered worldwide farming production by twenty-one percent. Extreme weather and heat damage the global agricultural sector in multiple ways: increases in the number of fires, soil erosion due to stronger winds along with the changes in rainfall patterns, and biodiversity loss. Allowing scientists to create new species resistant to climatic conditions, the genetic diversity of plants has always been an essential factor to farm productivity. However, because of global warming, a quarter of all wild species are expected to disappear within the next 50 years. With only 150 commonly cultivated plant species left—of which...
The Future of Sustainable Footwear
Technology

The Future of Sustainable Footwear

By Jay Jung As one of the most pressing threats to humanity, climate change bears increasing weight in consumer decisions. Ultimately, consumers want to know that their products are produced sustainably. In the fashion industry, one result has been numerous companies are working towards reengineering their company and products to be more eco-friendly; specifically, these efforts were shown in sports footwear produced from leading companies, Nike and Adidas. Still, within these developments remains an uncompromisable struggle between performance and sustainability and limited accessibility .  One iconic product, the one which began the sustainable footwear market, is the Nike Space Hippie. Space Hippie, released on June 11th, 2020, is a series of sustainable shoes made out of lef...
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): Hitting the Bullseye in Planetary Defense Development
Physics, Technology

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART): Hitting the Bullseye in Planetary Defense Development

By Logan Eskildsen In an age of rapid, multifaceted technological development, aerospace organizations continue to investigate practical solutions to issues that the cosmos, specifically asteroids, may impose on our planet. Among these fascinating developments, a collection of scientists from NASA and John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory made a headlining breakthrough with their Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), surfacing global news in September 2022. Tasked with creating a device to mitigate the paths of near-Earth objects (NEOs) in November 2021, the team devised a plan to collide a human-made spacecraft into a nearby asteroid and observe if the impact yielded significant changes. Didymos, meaning “twin” in Greek and hence the derivation of “double” within t...
A Spectrum of Hydrogen
Technology

A Spectrum of Hydrogen

By Sebastian Lemberger Climate change has turned the future of the energy sector into a puzzle. By 2050, the world must become zero-carbon in order to stave off the progression of the climate crisis, but the way that this shift will occur is yet to be determined. For many, the key to the energy sector’s advancement is the developing field of hydrogen fuel. However, the adoption of hydrogen fuel presents a set of problems pertaining to long-term sustainability that raise the question, is the technology worth adopting at all? As of 2023, 99.6% of the hydrogen fuel produced globally is “gray hydrogen,” meaning hydrogen whose production causes the emission of greenhouse gasses. This is because the cheapest way to produce hydrogen fuel is by reacting hydrocarbons like methane with superhe...
University of Rochester Researchers May Have Discovered a New Low-Pressure, Low-Temperature Superconductor
Technology

University of Rochester Researchers May Have Discovered a New Low-Pressure, Low-Temperature Superconductor

By Will Lucas Researchers at the University of Rochester may have made a groundbreaking discovery at the interface of physics, chemistry, and materials science. The research team, led by Dr. Ranga Dias, claims to have created a material that exhibits superconductivity at a temperature and pressure practical for industrial applications. The material, which superconductors at a temperature of sixty-nine degrees fahrenheit and a pressure of ten kilobars, or about 145,000 psi, is called a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH), but it has been affectionately dubbed “reddmatter” by the team due to its striking color at ambient pressure. Superconducting materials are able to conduct electricity without any energy loss. Though the superconductive pressure of 145,000 psi may sound high (ambi...
Opinion: The Online Privacy You Deserve—Individual Measures You Can Take to Protect Your Data Online
Technology

Opinion: The Online Privacy You Deserve—Individual Measures You Can Take to Protect Your Data Online

By Sophia Tartar Recent data-breach scandals, such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytical Data Scandal, have been inciting privacy concerns all around the world. Escape hacking attempts, cyberstalking, personal data profiles, location tracking, personalized marketing, and data breaches by understanding the ways they work, their effects on your day-to-day life, and how you can take action.  Why Does Privacy Matter? Just like you may not want your friends to know about your deepest secrets, you may not want your family members, key interests, travel plans, or political beliefs to be revealed by major companies such as Google and Facebook. Unfortunately, not only can your information in many search engines be legally searched by lawyers and sold to companies, but it can also be us...
Creating Malaria-Resistant Mosquitoes Using CRISPR Genome Editing
Biology, Technology

Creating Malaria-Resistant Mosquitoes Using CRISPR Genome Editing

By Connor Gleason Mosquitoes are the deadliest animals in the world. Diseases carried by mosquitoes kill more than 700,000 people annually, and one of the deadliest diseases carried by mosquitoes is malaria. Malaria is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum; in 2021, there were around 247,000,000 cases of the disease globally. Furthermore, over 619,000 people died from the disease in that same year. Malaria is most prominent in tropical and subtropical climates, and approximately half of the world’s population is at risk of the disease. Recent discoveries have revealed that CRISPR technology, a genome-editing tool, may be able to significantly reduce the rate of malaria transmission in two principal ways—by minimizing mosquito populations and by altering the way the disease’s para...
Op-Ed: Is it Time to Give Up on Nuclear?
Physics, Technology

Op-Ed: Is it Time to Give Up on Nuclear?

By John Moran For nearly seventy years, the prospect of a nuclear world has existed. The experiments with Chicago Pile-1, the first functioning nuclear reactor, displayed the near limitless power that can be produced through nuclear means. Yet, after all these years, the world is still extremely limited in its use of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy throughout history has been shown to be efficient, powerful, and relatively clean. However, due to fears that it is more dangerous and dirty than already established fossil fuels, nuclear power is largely ignored and therefore underdeveloped. Now, what is the validity of these fears, and what could come of the nuclear energy industry if we committed to investing more into the field?  Nuclear energy often evokes images of public health ...
Whole Genome Security: Consumer Privacy in Medical Genetics
Biology, Technology

Whole Genome Security: Consumer Privacy in Medical Genetics

By Sophia Tabibian In 1977, English biochemist, Fredrick Sanger, created the first full genome sequencing technique, mapping the complete arrangement of genes in a given genome. His method involved electrophoresis and chain-termination. DNA is made up of smaller units called nucleotides. Sanger used modified nucleotides called dideoxynucleotides (ddNTP), which bond to only a single end of nucleotides, breaking long strands of DNA into smaller pieces. He would run four separate reactions, each containing one of the a different types of ddNTP that would bond, and, in turn, cut the DNA at a specific spot. Then, he separated the products of these reactions by size on a special type of gel called polyacrylamide gel, which divides the reactions into four lanes. When the products are placed on...
Data Protection for All?—A Breakdown of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act
Technology

Data Protection for All?—A Breakdown of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act

By Mateo Schneider The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), currently under congressional review, would be the first piece of American legislation explicitly concerning data protection. Eighty-one percent of consumers say the potential risks they face from data collection by companies outweigh the benefits. Additionally, sixty-two percent of Americans don’t believe that it’s possible to go through their daily life without companies collecting data on them. These statistics paint a worrying picture of personal privacy in the United States, but these challenges don’t exist independently from one’s social identity. It is clear that U.S. citizens hold genuine concern about data security, which the ADPPA appears to address. With that said, the proposed bill makes monumental stri...