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Global health today is characterized by a mix of promising developments and troubling trends. Life expectancy is on the rise, and maternal and child mortality rates are falling. But millions lack basic nutrition, primary health care, and access to vaccinations; we are ill-prepared for the next global pandemic; tobacco use kills six million people annually; and noncommunica...
What does neuroscience have to offer education? A panel of leading developmental neuroscientists and master educators explain how a deepening understanding of interdependent neural processes can revolutionize teaching and learning. Emotions do not interfere with learning, as we once believed, but rather are crucial to our ability to engage complex ideas, process and retain...
Over the past decade, levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide have increased dramatically, but the causes are more nuanced than the headlines suggest. This session unpacks the data and real-world learnings to shed light on the changes — at the policy, family, school, and community levels — that have the most potential to improve kids’ well-being.
Sometimes, a single data point can arouse new insights, inspire a novel problem-solving approach, encourage a career shift, or even change a life. In an hour of fast-paced, sensory-rich storytelling, ten trailblazing development leaders from the global South share frontline stories about a piece of data that altered their journeys toward global health — and explain why the...
The belief that the paralyzed will walk and the deaf will hear is a staple of religion, literature, and myth. Now, technology is actually making that happen. Zeen has designed a battery-free mobility device to combine the best functions of a walker and wheelchair. Wristbands created by Neosensory feed sound vibrations directly from the skin to the brain, improving the abil...
Whether the headlines describe a “cancer moonshot” or a “war on cancer,” they capture a yearning and determination to eliminate the scourge of malignancy. Artificial intelligence, huge genomic data sets, and expanded access to clinical trials are pushing forward knowledge about the package of diseases we call cancer. As the treatment arsenal expands, it highlights both the...
The nursing crisis is a healthcare crisis. Reports across the country are ominous –70% of nurses are reporting burnout, 32% are considering leaving the profession, hospital RN vacancy rates are 19% and accelerating. And the pipeline for new nurses is choked – nursing educators are leaving in droves, resulting in 80,000 highly-qualified prospective students being turned awa...
The health of women and girls is closely tied to their right to make informed decisions about sexuality, marriage, and child-bearing, but the US is stepping back from leadership in this area. For the first time, the State Department has eliminated detailed information about contraception and maternal health care in its annual country reports on human rights. And the curren...
Dr. J. Craig Venter, one of the pioneers in human genome sequencing, talks about coming opportunities to use genomics, advanced technology and machine learning to custom-tailor individual care and fundamentally alter the practice of medicine.
Art tours for physicians, a choir for nurses, on-demand meditation for all healthcare workers. Clinical settings everywhere are testing support and wellness interventions to boost emotional health and tame the widespread stress and burnout among physicians, nurses, and other providers that intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to strain so many. Clinical s...
More than $2.7 trillion worth of food, medical products, and tobacco, representing 20 percent of every dollar spent by US consumers, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Always in the public eye, and often summoned to explain its actions to Congress, the FDA is as likely to be lauded as lambasted for its swift authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, its deci...
In his new book, Deep Medicine, Eric Topol – cardiologist, geneticist, digital medicine researcher – claims that artificial intelligence can put the humanity back into medicine. By freeing physicians from rote tasks, such as taking notes and performing medical scans, AI creates space for the real healing that occurs between a doctor who listens and a patient who needs to b...
Recent scientific evidence has confirmed significant links between lifestyle habits and cognitive health, but the many reports are often confusing, and sometimes contradictory. What does the new research reveal, and where do knowledge gaps remain? Can we translate what we are learning into practical strategies for improving memory performance and optimizing brain health?
The health effects of climate change sound a clarion warning that we must attend to a rapidly deteriorating environment. Polluted cities, severe droughts and flooding, and devastating storms are portents of a world in which risks to the health of the planet and the health of families are closely linked. We urgently need visionary and strategic leaders who can identify and...
As climate change increasingly becomes a fact of daily life, the health hazards of rising sea levels, catastrophic storms, water and food shortages, respiratory and vector-borne diseases, and temperature extremes are coming into sharper focus. Military leaders are warning that climate change could result in a refugee crisis of “unimaginable scale,” and some experts believe...
Rural residents photograph ailing chickens to monitor the spread of Avian flu, mountaineer adventurers collect scat samples so microbes in isolated locations can be identified, and sailors take water samples that reveal the plastic afloat in the world’s oceans. These citizen scientists are ordinary people who collect data in the field that support researchers warning of di...
Amazing discoveries are happening in the garages and high school science classes of young pioneers. A 17-year-old invented color-changing stitches, dyed with beet juice, to provide early warning signs of infection. A Time Magazine “Kid of the Year” is building a device to detect contaminants in the water supply and using AI to call out cyberbullying. Another teenager devel...
Community health workers bring lifesaving care to hard-to-reach locations. More than one billion people inhabit areas so remote that they lack any access to healthcare, but not too remote to trigger fast-moving epidemics. Enter community health workers, who can detect disease outbreaks, identify malnutrition and malaria, and provide basic primary care. Once operating large...
Vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are the five human senses most of us are fortunate enough to know intimately. We like to say that intuition is our sixth sense, but Emma Young, an award-winning journalist who writes extensively about science and health, delves into research that has uncovered many others. In Super Senses: The Science of Your 32 Senses and How to Us...
Burnout is afflicting more than half the physicians in the United States, according to the National Academy of Medicine, which defines it as “a syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work.” Doctors are leaving the field in droves, intensifying acute workforce shortages that put patien...