eScienceCommons

A parasitic wasp on the prowl for fruit fly larva to inject with her eggs. By Carol ClarkParasitic wasps switch off the immune systems of fruit flies by draining calcium from the flies’ blood cells, a finding that offers new insight into how pathogens break through a host’s defenses.“We believe that we have discovered an important component of cellular immunity, one that parasites have learned to take advantage of,” says Emory University biologist Todd Schlenke, whose lab led the […]

Who owns the moon? Is it fair to send people on a one-way trip to Mars? Can doctors safeguard medical experiments in other environments? These are just a few of the ethical questions confronting the human race as we continue to explore space.The Emory Looks at Hollywood series examines these questions in context of the new Paramount Pictures movie "Star Trek Into Darkness," the latest in the long-running Star Trek story. Watch the video above as Paul Root Wolpe, Director of the Center for […]

The Powerball jackpot is up to $475 million, the second-largest in the lottery's history. Lottery officials put the odds of winning at one in 195 million, "meaning you are 251 times more likely to be hit by lightning," reports Alan Farnham of ABC's Good Morning America.Below is an excerpt from Farnham's report:"Skip Garibaldi, a professor of mathematics at Emory University in Atlanta, provides additional perspective: You are more likely to die from all of the following than you are to win […]

Asking a poet to give a commencement keynote seems like “both a no-brainer and a curious dare,” Rita Dove told Emory’s class of 2013.A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Dove spoke of “the interconnectedness of all knowledge.” She warned that institutions of higher learning that diminish liberal arts programs in favor of business, law, medicine and scientific research will not prosper in the long run:“How did we end up in this tug of war anyway? When was it decided […]

Among the more than 4,200 celebrants at Emory’s commencement today were six Tibetan monks – the first group of monastics to complete a curriculum of modern science training at the behest of the Dalai Lama.The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative aims to bring the best of Western science to the monastics, while sharing insights from Tibetan meditative practices to the Western world.When they arrived on the Emory campus three years ago, the monks had little or no scientific training and limited […]