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Many medical products come from living creatures, but horseshoe crabs play a unique role. The milky-blue blood of these living fossils that have barely changed for hundreds of millions of years contains a protein called LAL that drug developers use to test their products for common toxins. Thousands of the crabs are harvested every year, bled in labs and returned (mostly) alive to the ocean.
Kristoffer Whitney and Jolie Crunelle, researchers who study science and public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, explain why conservationists are worried about this use of horseshoe crabs, and the growing call to shift to synthetic substitutes for LAL. It’s a controversy that cuts across multiple regulatory fields and requires striking a balance between protecting nature and human health.
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Horseshoe crabs in spawning season at Reeds Beach, N.J., on June 13, 2023.
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Kristoffer Whitney, Rochester Institute of Technology; Jolie Crunelle, Rochester Institute of Technology
Horseshoe crabs play a unique role in medicine, but they’re also ecologically important in their home waters along the Atlantic coast. Can regulators balance the needs of humans and nature?
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Environment + Energy
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Aaron Levine, University of Washington
An atmospheric scientist explains how El Niño works, this year’s oddities and why this phenomenon doesn’t last long.
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Health + Medicine
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Libby Richards, Purdue University
Newly approved and updated vaccines are the best tools available to combat COVID-19, the flu and RSV, as infections and hospitalizations tick upward and cold and flu season gets underway.
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Ethics + Religion
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Judith Huacuja, University of Dayton
Over the past decades, many Chicana artists have used Guadalupe to emphasize issues of justice around immigration.
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Science + Technology
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Luke Keller, Ithaca College
Controlled experiments are impossible in astronomy, as are direct measurements of physical properties of objects outside our solar system. So how do astronomers know so much about them?
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Economy + Business
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David R. Buys, Mississippi State University; John J. Green, Mississippi State University; Mary Nelson Robertson, Mississippi State University
It’s part of a decadeslong trend.
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Politics + Society
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Javed Ali, University of Michigan
Israel’s intelligence capacities are considered some of the best in the world – but unlike the US, it does not have a central organization coordinating all intelligence.
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