Will Diet and Exercise Save Us All?

Will Diet and Exercise Save Us All?

How many times have you been to the doctor and was told that a balanced lifestyle is key for a healthy, disease-free, long life? How many times did genetics take the blame? But do we really know whether genetic risk associated with complex diseases can be offset by behavioral changes? A recent study at the New England Journal of Medicine now brings us some answers. The idea that most human dise...

Will Empathy Save Us?

Recent prescriptions for rescuing civilization from collapse involve extending our human capacity for empathy to a global scale. This is a worthy goal, but several indications leave grounds for cautious optimism at best. Evolutionary biology interprets non-kin helping behaviors as products of natural selection that rewarded only the transmission success of resident genes within ancestors, not t...

Anticipating the Changes That Will Touch Us All.

Can technology save us?

Asks the reader to: assume there is incredible technological progress in endeavours to solve problems of energy scarcity, pollution and congestion; imagine a super Super Car powered by a pollution-free perpetual motion engine; imagine a super Internet which provides free and efficient access to all the databases and libraries in the world. The result would be a social and environmental disaster...

Antivenom: the Shortage at Hand and How Polyspecific Antivenom May save Us All

University of Pittsburgh, Swanson School of Engineering 1 Submission Date 11.01.2016 Disclaimer—This paper partially fulfills a writing requirement for first year (freshman) engineering students at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. This paper is a student, not a professional, paper. This paper is based on publicly available information and may not provide complete anal...