October 11, 2023: A sour-sweet solution to healing chronic wounds, gender wage gap research wins a prize and our new podcast mini-series reports from a rapidly-warming Arctic. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | An effective treatment for chronic wounds and burns might be sitting in your pantry: a mixture of honey and vinegar that has been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years. Honey stresses bacteria and fights infections with its high sugar content and acidity. Similarly, vinegar's active component, acetic acid, is a natural antiseptic that breaks down bacterial DNA and proteins. When combined, the mixture is called oxymel. In a recent study, oxymel killed up to 1,000 times more bacteria in a laboratory-grown biofilm than vinegar alone and up to 100,000 times more than honey alone.
Why this matters: With antibiotic-resistant bacteria on the rise, scientists are eagerly seeking new ways to fight intransigent infections. Oxymel could be particularly valuable for chronic wound infections. These long-lived skin lesions are common in people with diabetes or burn trauma, and they often contain organized colonies of stubbornly antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
What the experts say: "Chronic wounds are a huge burden on the health-care system," says Andrew Vardanian, a plastic surgeon at UCLA Health, who specializes in complex wounds. "We need alternatives because some treatments don't work for certain patients." Oxymel would also be much cheaper than existing infection treatments. | | | The 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences—the "economics Nobel"—has been awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin at Harvard University. Goldin's work has helped to explain why women have been under-represented in the labor market for at least the past two centuries, and why even today they continue to earn less than men on average (by around 13 percent).
What she did: Throughout her career Goldin conducted extensive examinations of historical records, resulting in a rigorous forensic analysis of changes in women's participation in the labor force. She demonstrated that, although work opportunities for women expanded in the 20th century, especially in societies in which children leave the parental home, they were not exploited as much as they could have been (called a market inefficiency in economics). Some factors influencing this gap involve decreased expectations of success and unequal career opportunities for women during the industrial age through today. In 2010 she showed that parenthood has a key role in maintaining pay inequality, largely through loss of earnings when women suspend or restrict work in favor of child-rearing.
What the experts say: "Goldin has been saying for many years that the way work is organized in many professions is especially female-unfriendly," says Barbara Petrongolo, an economist at the University of Oxford. | | | Credit: Mike Reid/Let's Talk Science | | | In a tiny village 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories in Canada, Inuvialuit locals are measuring climate change in real-time from the water off of Tuk Island, a small but extremely important barrier island that's protecting the village's harbor. The island is quickly eroding in a changing climate. Tune in to our three-part podcast mini-series about the fast-warming Arctic. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
| | | • An abundance of evidence shows that writing for five to 20 minutes a day can improve health, diminish stress, increase self-confidence and even kindle the imagination. | 6 min read | | | • Zoom calls, selfies and social media have been significantly associated with appearance dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression and eating disorders. Reducing screen time can help. | 6 min read | | | • Fossilized human footprints found in New Mexico's White Sands National Park were almost certainly made more than 20,000 years ago, during the height of the last ice age. | 4 min read | | | • Thousands of mysterious spots of barren soil, called fairy circles, have been discovered in areas from Madagascar to southwestern Asia. | 5 min read | | | Detail of fairy circles in the sandy landscape of western Namibia near low-lying mountain ranges. Credit: imageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy Stock Photo | | | • Debate about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, also known as UFOs) is transforming our politics and culture—with effects that are largely overlooked. "Social scientists should weigh in on UAP, now," write Greg Eghigian and Christian Peters. Eghigian is a professor at Penn State University and Peters is managing director of the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Right off the bat, they say, there are three areas that social scientists can weigh in on: intelligence, trust and research ethics. | 6 min read | | | • The death of two Black baby boys set the clinical basis for work on the RSV vaccine. But their families never knew that. | Undark | | | • AI image generators are riddled with biases and stereotypes, according to an analysis of 3,000 images. | Rest of World | | | • Target claims it has to close stores because of shoplifting. The data tell a different story. | Popular Information | | | Ubiquitous evidence tells us that the more women who work, the better the economy functions (especially true in developing countries). Why is closing the gender labor gap so difficult? Here's what might solve this persistent problem, according to a former and a current World Bank researcher. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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