Tag: Carnegie Mellon University
Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem
Last year, 18 percent of Stanford University seniors graduated with a degree in computer science, more than double the proportion of just a decade earlier. Over the same period at MIT, that rate went up from 23 percent to 42 percent. These increases are common everywhere: The average number of undergraduate CS majors at universities in the U.S. and Canada tripled in the decade after 2005, and it keeps growing. Students’ interest in CS is intellectual—culture moves through computation these
Computers May Have Cracked the Code to Diagnosing Sepsis
This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.
Ten years ago, 12-year-old Rory Staunton dove for a ball in gym class and scraped his arm. He woke up the next day with a 104-degree Fahrenheit fever, so his parents took him to the pediatrician and eventually the emergency room. It was just the stomach flu, they were told. Three days later, Rory died of sepsis after bacteria from the scrape infiltrated his blood and triggered organ failure.
“How does that
America Created Its Own Booster Problems
By this point in the pandemic, the benefits of boosters seem pretty darn clear. Boosters continue the immune system’s education on the coronavirus, upping the quantity of defensive fighters available, while expanding the breadth of variants that vaccinated bodies can snipe at. During Omicron’s winter wave, people who received a booster were less likely to be infected, hospitalized, or killed by the virus than those without a boost; older people and other high-risk populations especially benefited from dosing up again.
America Is Running Out of New Ideas
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Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies?
Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely new stories. The top movies of 1998—including Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, and There’s Something About Mary—were almost all based on original screenplays. But since then, the U.S. box office has been steadily overrun by numbers and superheroes: Iron Man 2, Jurassic Park 3, Toy Story 4,
COVID-19 Vaccine Success Could Be Measured With One Number
When Kishana Taylor welcomes her twins into the world this December, she’ll be pretty confident that they won’t be carrying the virus that causes rubella, an infection that can be disastrous in infants. Thanks to a vaccine she received as a child, Taylor, a virologist at Carnegie Mellon University, is still immune to the pathogen decades later.
She was able to confirm that in June through a simple test that searched her blood for antibodies that recognize the rubella virus,