By Emily Zhou During the inhospitable winter and spring months, the flu runs rampant around urbanized cities with high population density, initiating another season of terrible illness. We have become accustomed enough to its presence to perceive it as an almost harmless disease; in reality, most people are uneducated about the operations of this illness and, unfortunately, many still pass away due to improper treatment.
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By Christina Lee Neglected Tropical DiseasesThe drug discovery process is arduous, risky, and extremely expensive, costing pharmaceutical companies around $2.6 billion to develop a marketable drug. It is no wonder that little research is being done on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), a group of 20 diseases that mainly affect underprivileged populations. These populations are unlikely to be able to fund for research regarding those tropical diseases and even less likely to be able to pay for their treatment if a drug were to be developed and put on the market. However, more than a sixth of the world’s population is affected by NTDs, and the number is only going up. Measures need to be taken in order to treat the patients that need help the most.
By Amy Cheng
Language is always present, as a sign of civilization, society, and class. It is fundamental to the way individuals interact, and entirely adjustable to different levels of formality. Bluntly speaking, no human can thrive without language. But babies emerge biologically unable to participate in conversation—throat and voice development happens six months after they’ve been pushed into a world of sound. And beyond needing the physiological structures, they still have to: pick up on the alphabetical sounds that make up a language: vibrate those observations into sounds: assign complex strings of syllables to things and actions and descriptions: discover grammar: respond to and have conversation with respect to situation and tone and mood: adjust to accents and dialects and slang, all in the timespan of a couple of years. Some even have to do this all for multiple languages. In the USA alone, there are hundreds of tongues spoken in addition to English! How do infants do it? By Natalia Zorrilla The moon landing actually took place in a secret Hollywood backlot. Paul McCartney has been dead since 1966, and the Beatles have been letting clues slip in their songs since. Area 51 holds the carefully hidden remains of alien spacecraft. Reptiles have infiltrated the upper echelons of American government. Lee Harvey Oswald was not alone in his assassination of John F. Kennedy.
If you’ve heard any of these statements, you’ve likely also heard them dismissed as conspiracy theories, or explanations for events that propose the existence of large-scale, hidden forces working towards diabolical ends. Most of these theories fly in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Yet a 2011 national survey by the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies indicates that roughly 55% of the American public believes in at least one conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists aren’t just paranoid recluses tucked away in their mothers’ basements. Odds are that, with or without realizing it, you actually know one yourself. |
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