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Celebrated every March, Women's History Month honors the often-overlooked contributions of women in history, society, and culture. This year's theme — "Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope"— salutes both the brave frontline workers of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the countless women who have provided healing and hope throughout history.

Elizabeth Blackwell, who made history in 1849 by becoming the first woman to earn a medical degree in America, did not even want to be a doctor. She was happy being a teacher — a more "suitable" career for women in the 19th century. She only decided to pursue medicine after a close friend, who was dying of cancer, said her experience would have been better under the care of a female physician.

In 1857, Blackwell recruited her sister Emily — the third woman to earn a medical degree in America — and a physician friend to establish the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. The free clinic provided female doctors with much-needed training and experience. She also founded the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary — the first four-year all-female medical college. The pioneer continued to advocate for women in medicine till her death in 1910 at age 89. Since 2016, Blackwell's birthday — February 3 — has been designated National Women Physicians Day.

nt polymers, which include all plastics, are made up of chains of building blocks called monomers. They are strung together in repetitive patterns. While the monomer chains are strong, the gaps between them are weak and porous. This is the reason you are sometimes able to smell food stored inside ziplock bags.

The researchers assert that the flat sheets of polymer can be stacked together to make strong, ultra-light building materials that could replace steel. Since 2DPA-1 is cheap to manufacture in large quantities, it would substantially reduce the cost of building different structures. It would also be better for the environment because steel production is responsible for about 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

The MIT scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature on February 3, 2022, did not test to see if 2DPA-1 can be recycled. However, they believe the stronger, durable material could someday replace disposable containers. This would help reduce plastic pollution.

one of the most absurd features of modern Britain is that “we’re not building houses in a housing crisis”

The average British home now costs about nine times average earnings: one estimate I recently read reckoned that the last time UK houses were this expensive was in 1876.

Across England, between 2021 and 2022, 21,600 social homes were either sold or demolished, but only 7,500 were built.

what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story.

A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984

The long-feared “population bomb” may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.

on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.

The new forecasts are good news for the global environment. Once the demographic bulge is overcome, pressure on nature and the climate should start to ease, along with associated social and political tensions.

Economists tried to deal with the twin stresses of inflation and recession in the 1970s without success, and now here we are, 50 years and 50-plus economics Nobel Prizes later, with little ground gained

There’s weirdness yet to come, and a lot more than run-of-the-mill weirdness. We are entering a new epoch of crisis, a slow-motion tidal wave of risks that will wash over our economy in the next decades — namely climate change, demographics, deglobalization and artificial intelligence.

Their effects will range somewhere between economic regime shift and existential threat to civilization.

As ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence programs infiltrate workplaces, white-collar jobs are transforming the fastest.

The biggest workplace challenge so far this year across industries is how to adapt to the rapidly evolving role of AI in office work, they say.

according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, most jobs will be changed in some form by generative pretrained transformers, or GPTs, which use machine learning based on internet data to generate any kind of text, from creative writing to code. 

The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level

We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups

however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012

So, am I wrong to delight in this bird when so much woe stalks birds in general? The question seems pertinent when our mental bandwidth is packed with generalized gloom

There is the problem of climate, the problem of democracy, the problem of gun violence, the water problem, the social media problem, the free speech problem, the policing problem, the inequality problem, the debt problem, the border problem, the overdose problem, and the linked problem of inflation and bank collapses. Oh, yes: And the bird problem.

Nor might it be coincidence that the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center — excellent sources when it comes to opinion surveys — report that the ground has begun crumbling beneath American morale.

Artificial intelligence is unreservedly advanced by the stupid (there’s nothing to fear, you’re being paranoid), the preening (buddy, you don’t know your GPT-3.4 from your fine-tuned LLM), and the greedy (there is huge wealth at stake in the world-changing technology, and so huge power).

Everyone else has reservations and should.

The whole thing is almost entirely unregulated because no one knows how to regulate it or even precisely what should be regulated.

Unlike Einstein, who was urging the US to get ahead, these distinguished authors want everyone to slow down, and in a completely rational world that is what we would do

But, very much like the 1940s, that is not going to happen. Is the US, having gone to great trouble to deny China the most advanced semi-conductors necessary for cutting-edge AI, going to voluntarily slow itself down? Is China going to pause in its own urgent effort to compete? Putin observed six years ago that “whoever becomes leader in this sphere will rule the world”. We are now in a race that cannot be stopped.

Now we have to get used to capabilities that grow much, much faster, advancing radically in a matter of weeks. That is the real reason 1,100 experts have hit the panic button. Since the advent of Deep Learning by machines about ten years ago, the scale of “training compute” — think of this as the power of AI — has doubled every six months

Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper.

And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient

Block: There’s always stuff going on the blockchain, but these companies also have agreements off of the blockchain, right? Everything they have inside these exchanges is not on the blockchain. It’s using regular old database technology, and it’s not traceable at all. So yeah, a lot of the most important economic activity in crypto has nothing to do with blockchain at all. Huge percentages of people who do this kind of retail crypto trading, they don’t even know how to take what they bought off the exchange and put it in their own wallet.

Most recombinant SARS-CoV-2 viruses have dwindled away in a matter of weeks or months, unable to outcompete other lineages. XBB, on the other hand, got a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.

From one parent, it gained a set of mutations that helped it evade antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations. From the other parent, it gained a separate set of mutations that made it even more evasive.

“XBB literally picked up the most possible mutations that it could possibly pick up from those two parents,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. The new combination made XBB one of the most evasive Omicron subvariants in existence last summer.

the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage

The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years

Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.

what sets Mr Tate apart from other alt-right social-media personalities and previous anti-feminist online movements is the extent to which his views have found a ready audience among teenage boys.

In 2021 Mr Tate established Hustlers University, an online platform where young men could take courses in business and investing for $49.99 a month. It also gave students financial rewards for promoting Mr Tate’s misogynist ideas via a now-suspended affiliate marketing programme. Thanks to a continuing stream of fan-generated content, his views have proliferated on social media even though most platforms have banned his accounts.

Part of the reason why Mr Tate has found success specifically on TikTok is that its algorithm is uniquely predictive, appearing not only to rely on the content users watch and recommend, but making assumptions about their potential interests

“It is clear from archaeological artifacts and historical documents that they also took captives,” he said, adding that the new study suggests the number of slaves brought back to Scandinavia by the Vikings was enough to influence genetic composition of the region.The study revealed, too, that primarily females were moved into Scandinavia from the east during this time—which “suggests that the Vikings may have preferentially targeted women and girls as slaves,” Dr. Collard said.

The researchers found that, following the Viking Age, there was a notable decline in Baltic and British-Irish ancestries among Scandinavians. While there remains some genetic influence from these regions today, it is “not as much as we would expect,” Dr. Götherström said.

“The only credible way I can explain that is a lot of these people that came into Scandinavia during the Viking period didn’t build families and weren’t as efficient in getting children as the people who were already living there,”