top 10 research topics from 2021

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Top 10 research topics from 2021.

Find the answers to your biggest research questions from 2021. With collective views of over 3.7 million, researchers explored topics spanning from nutritional immunology and political misinformation to sustainable agriculture and the human-dog bond .

Research Topics:

1. Infectious disease

• 1,643,000 views
• 29 articles

2. Nutritional immunology

• 768,000 views

3. Music therapy

• 268,000 views
• 44 articles

4. Political misinformation

• 219,000 views
• 11 articles

5. Plant science

• 198,000 views
• 15 articles

6. Sustainable agriculture

• 168,000 views
• 49 articles

7. Mental health

• 136,000 views
• 22 articles

8. Aging brains

• 134,000 views
• 18 articles

Benefits of human-dog interactions

• 229,000 views
• 13 articles

10. Mood disorders

• 102,000 views
• 12 articles

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125 Best Research Paper Topics of 2021

When you get into high school, you are not aware of the number of responsibilities you might have to face over your academics, making you feel clogged and exhausted, especially when writing and submitting research papers on time.

One of the most challenging parts of writing a research paper is to find a perfect topic to write. Luckily, we have done all the hard work for you and have created a list of 125 fascinating research paper topics.

For your further convenience, we have organized the topics into different categories covering a wide range of subjects so you can easily choose the best topic according to your interest and knowledge.

Besides the list of good research topics, I have also talked about selecting a good research topic and how you can use your subject to start writing an excellent paper.

How to Select a Perfect Research Paper Topic?

Before you start writing, you need to make sure you choose a great topic. Below mentioned are the three crucial factors to contemplate before selecting the best research paper topics.

Choosing a field, you are interested in

It is difficult to find a research paper topic because most high-school students are confused about selecting their major. However, you can always select an area of interest.

There are always specific research topics on trending. Many people seem interested in writing about the buzzing topics; never feel tempted or go with the crowd and make it your subject unless you genuinely have some interest in it.

There is enough information to foster your research.

Once you have chosen the best research paper topic and you're happy to write about it, it is still challenging to produce a good paper if there isn't enough information about the subject. 

This is possible for very particular or specialized topics, and sometimes some topics are too new to have enough research conducted on them at the moment. Simple topics will always have more than enough information to write a full-length paper. Writing a research paper on a topic that does not have enough information is extremely hard. Before you take up a topic, do primary research and make sure you have all the essential information to write your research paper.

The research paper fits your teacher guidelines. 

Always note down any specific requirements or restrictions your teacher may have implemented on some research topic ideas. If you are writing a research paper on a political science topic, deciding to write about technology’s impact on sports won’t be allowed. Still, there can be some sort of flexibility.

For example, if you want to write about the “Portrayal of minorities by Media” and your teacher wants you to write about “History,” you can combine both topics and develop something relevant. Like “How the portrayal of minorities by media go a long way back.” You can also use companies, like do my essay , to help you write your research paper.

For your convenience, we have organized the topics into different categories. It will also make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Simple research paper topics

• How important is diversity within the team, and why?
• What makes one sport more accepted than another?
• How would the world be different without the discoveries of Albert Einstein?
• Rise of anime; what made anime admired worldwide?
• Is the traditional music of a country foremost than the international music that is popular around the world?
• What causes people to change their leisure time activities as they get older?
• What is the best way to deal with procrastination?
• What are hobbies more favored with children and adults in your area?
• Are there hobbies you can easily do in your own country but not so comfortable when you go to another country? Why?
• What are stereotypes of people from your country, and how true are those?

Interesting research paper topics

• How true is it that older people are wiser and correct, always right in their choices?
• Can technology cause a gap between generations?
• How different are friendships between men from friendships between women, and why?
• Can amusement parks have an educational motive aside from an entertaining one? 
• What things make people in your country happy?
• What are the pros and cons of plastic surgery?
• Does beauty, in general, decide how much a person will be happy and successful in life?
• What other common sayings such as “Actions speak louder than words” exist in your language, and what life lessons they teach?
• What makes Nordic regions happier and more prosperous than others?
• Ways to communicate better with family, friends, colleagues, and strangers?

Controversial topics for research paper

These topics might stimulate terrible responses from some people because most of these subjects are controversial and are likely to raise some issues. Be careful before writing about such topics.

• What is the context of all terrorist attacks in the world?
• How to deal with a large number of immigrants?
• How to prevent a rise in the number of homeless children?
• What is the proper punishment for serial killers and rapists?
• Will religion survive the future? Explain

Aggressive research topics

• Are video games the reason for more antisocial people?
• What makes communism the best political system in the world?
• How will a rise in the minimum wage help increase economic mobility?
• Should steroids be allowed in sports?
• What can things be done on an individual level to prevent cyberbullying?

Research topics by different fields of study

In different fields of study, you can tell your brain to perform innovatively. Here, you can carry out extensive research to put forward new opinions.

• What were the devastating impacts of British rule in India ? 
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• Was it necessary to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation ? 
• What caused the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan ?
• What are the important events in the history of Latin America? 
• How did Greece become a huge philosophical hub in ancient times?
• How did people study foreign languages before the 19th century?
• Who profited the most from wars in the Middle Ages?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?

Sample History research papers

Environment 

• How deadly is the Earth’s climate change in the past few decades?
• How have previous oil spills changed regulations and cleaning methods?
• Make a detailed analysis of deforestation rates globally over a while.
• Impacts of Paris Climate Agreement on environment
• How to improve access to clean water around the world?
• Should developed countries rely more on nuclear energy?
• What to do to save amphibian species which are presently at risk of extinction?
• What impacts has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Why has the number of natural disasters increased in the past few decades?

Sample Environment research papers 

• What can health issues be caused by emotional stress?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the advantages and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How do the healthcare plans of different countries vary from each other?
• How to lower blood pressure using natural herbs?
• Is it appropriate for parents to skip vaccination?
• How can you encourage obese people to change their lifestyles?
• What are the cons of genetically modified foods?
• Explain the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
• How much work out/ exercise should the average adult be getting each week?

Sample Health research papers

• How is business etiquette changed in the past decade?
• How can the understanding of culture change the way you do business?
• Who are the exceptional businessmen in the 21st century?
• Who are the exceptional businesswomen in the 21st century?
• What are the traits of team leaders, and how to become one?
• Why is the cause in the rise of the popularity of stock markets?
• What are the pros and cons of an all-female working environment?
• The difference in Islamic banking systems from traditional ones?
• What are the effects of gold and diamonds on the economy?
• How do offshore bank accounts work – the case of Panama papers?
• Analyze the history and future of self-driving vehicles.
• How the invention of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Why has social media made people less connected to reality?
• Rise of Artificial Intelligence? Explain
• Do smartphones improve or reduce workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is social media manipulating and causing depression?
• What is the history behind the Internet of Things?
• Can everything be solar-powered?
• What is the distinction between open and closed systems?

Sample Technology research papers

• Why did we stop believing in multiple gods?
• Are religion and spirituality connected?
• What is Karma?
• Why are teenagers less religious than older people?
• How are terrorist attacks affecting religion? 
• What are the new ideologies becoming popular?
• How are Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism connected?
• Teachings of Hinduism (you can choose any religion)
• What influence do religions have on the perception of right and wrong?
• Can other religions help to change the view of women in Arabic cultures?

Social Media

• Are social media making us lonely, empty from the inside, and unsociable?
• How to protect children online?
• What are some techniques to identify pedophiles on social media?
• Why do people have the want to post everything online?
• How to prevent cyber-bullying?
• Can LinkedIn help people find jobs or further education?
• How to make a break from social media?
• Why are more adolescent generations obsessed with the number of followers and likes?
• How bad is social media addiction?
• Who are world-famous influencers on social media?
• What is causing the rise in popularity of classical music?
• Why are world-famous musicians more prone to become drug abusers?
• History and the rise of hip-hop culture
• Why do people listen to sad music when they do not feel good?
• What happens to your mind when you listen to 432 HZ frequency music?
• How is the US education system different from the education systems in other countries?
• Impact of college debt on the future life choices of students?
• What benefits do physical education classes have on students' health?
• Do children who attend preschool excel in school in the future?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Montessori Method ?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• Do students who get free meals at school get higher grades than those who do not receive any free meal?
• Impact of technology on studies
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• Homeschoolers VS Traditional school; who performs better in the college 

Current Affairs

• How have the motives of feminists changed over the decades?
• What are the impacts of China’s one-child policy?
• What factors gave rise to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• Difference between US immigration laws and immigration laws of other countries
• Explain the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• Explain Brexit
• What factors contributed to China becoming a superpower?
• How has the “Black Lives Matter” movement affected the view about racism in the world?
• How will India become a superpower in 2050?
• History and rise of Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency 

Conclusion 

Make sure to do your research before you start writing. You do not have to make a mistake to start writing your research paper and then learn that there is not enough information to foster your research. 

In some cases, your research can contradict the points you are trying to explain. Get most of your research done before your start writing. Create an outline to understand your flow. This will help keep your paper clear and structured, and you will get clarity to produce a strong report.

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MIT’s top research stories of 2021

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Despite the pandemic’s disruptions, MIT’s research community still found a way to generate a number of impressive research breakthroughs in 2021. In the spirit of reflection that comes with every new orbit around the sun, below we count down 10 of the most-viewed research stories on MIT News from the past year.

We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories .

10. Giving cancer treatment a recharge . In October, researchers discovered a way to jump-start the immune system to attack tumors. The method combines chemotherapy and immunotherapy to spur immune cells into action. The researchers hope it could allow immunotherapy to be used against more types of cancer.

9. Generating 3D holograms in real-time . Computer scientists developed a deep-learning-based system that allows computers to create holograms almost instantly. The system could be used to create holograms for virtual reality, 3D printing, medical imaging, and more — and it’s efficient enough to run on a smartphone.

8. Creating inhalable vaccines . Scientists at the Koch Institute developed a method for delivering vaccines directly to the lungs through inhalation. The new strategy induced a strong immune response in the lungs of mice and could offer a quicker response to viruses that infect hosts through mucosal surfaces.

7. Assessing Covid-19 transmission risk . Two MIT professors proposed a new approach to estimating the risks of exposure to Covid-19 in different indoor settings. The guidelines suggest a limit for exposure based on factors such as the size of the space, the number of people, the kinds of activity, whether masks are worn, and ventilation and filtration rates.

6. Teaching machine learning models to adapt . Researchers in CSAIL developed a new type of neural network that can change its underlying equations to continuously adapt to new data. The advance could improve models’ decision-making based on data that changes over time, such as in medical diagnosis and autonomous driving.

5. Programming fibers . In June, a team created the first fabric fiber with digital capabilities. The fibers can sense, store, analyze, and infer data and activity after being sewn into a shirt. The researchers say the fibers could be used to monitor physical performance, to detect diseases, and for a variety of medical purposes.

4. Examining the limitations of data visualizations . A collaboration between anthropologists and computer scientists found that coronavirus skeptics have used sophisticated data visualizations to argue against public health orthodoxy like wearing a mask. The researchers concluded that data visualizations aren’t sufficient to convey the urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic because even the clearest graphs can be interpreted through a variety of belief systems.

3. Developing a Covid-detecting face mask . Engineers at MIT and Harvard University designed a prototype face mask that can diagnose the person wearing the mask with Covid-19 in about 90 minutes. The masks are embedded with tiny, disposable sensors that can be fitted into other face masks and could also be adapted to detect other viruses.

2. Confirming Hawking’s black hole theorem . Using observations of gravitational waves, physicists from MIT and elsewhere confirmed a major theorem created by Stephen Hawking in 1971. The theorem states that the area of a black hole’s event horizon — the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape — will never shrink.

1. Advancing toward fusion energy . In September, researchers at MIT and the MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems ramped up a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. The demonstration was three years in the making and is believed to resolve one of greatest remaining points of uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that produces more energy than it consumes.

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HBR’s Most-Read Research Articles of 2021

• Dagny Dukach

A look back at the insights that resonated most with our readers.

What will it take to make work better? Over the past year, HBR has published a wide array of research-backed articles that explore topics ranging from retaining employees to overcoming meeting overload to fostering gender equity in the workplace. In this end-of-year roundup, we share key insights and trends from our most-read research articles of 2021.

As the workplace rapidly transforms in the wake of the pandemic, social movements, and more, a fundamental question remains: How can we ensure we’re making work better — for employees, organizations, and society at large?

• Dagny Dukach is a former associate editor at Harvard Business Review.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

• Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
• Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
• How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
• How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
• How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
• How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

• What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
• How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
• How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
• Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
• How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
• How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
• What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
• What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
• Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies  (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
• Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
• Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
• Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
• Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
• Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
• What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
• Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
• Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
• Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
• How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
• Should graduate students be able to form unions?

• What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
• How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
• Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
• How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
• How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
• Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
• Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
• Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
• Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
• Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
• Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
• Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
• Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
• Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
• How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
• Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
• What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
• What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
• Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
• Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
• Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
• What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
• How does stress affect the body?
• Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
• What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
• How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
• What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
• What were the causes of the Civil War?
• How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
• Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?
• Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
• What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
• How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
• What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

• Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
• Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
• How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
• How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
• What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
• What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
• How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

• How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
• How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
• Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
• Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
• How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
• How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
• What are the pros and cons of fracking?
• What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
• What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
• How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
• Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
• Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
• What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
• What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
• How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
• Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
• How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Has social media made people more or less connected?
• What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
• Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
• When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
• Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

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These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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The Ten Most Significant Science Stories of 2021

Thrilling discoveries, hurdles in the fight against Covid and advancements in space exploration defined the past year

Associate Editor, Science

Covid-19 dominated science coverage again in 2021, and deservedly so. The disease garnered two entries on this list of our picks for the most important science stories of the year. But other key discoveries and achievements marked the year in science too, and they deserve more attention. NASA and private companies notched firsts in space. Scientists discovered more about the existence of early humans. And researchers documented how climate change has impacted everything from coral reefs to birds. Covid-19 will continue to garner even more attention next year as scientists work to deal with new variants and develop medical advances to battle the virus. But before you let stories about those topics dominate your reading in 2022, it’s worth it to take a look back at the biggest discoveries and accomplishments of this past year. To that end, here are our picks for the most important science stories of 2021.

The Covid Vaccine Rollout Encounters Hurdles

Last year the biggest science story of the year was that scientists developed two mRNA Covid vaccines in record time. This year the biggest Covid story is that the rollout of those vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, and one other by Johnson and Johnson, haven’t made their way into a large proportion of the United States population and a significant portion of the world. As of this writing on December 21 , roughly 73 percent of the U.S. population has received one dose, and roughly 61 percent of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated. An incomplete rollout allowed for a deadly summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant . Experts pointed out that vaccination rates lagged due to widespread disinformation and misinformation campaigns . It didn’t help that some popular public figures —like Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers , musician Nick Minaj , podcast host Joe Rogan and rapper Ice Cube —chose not to get vaccinated. Luckily, by November, U.S. health officials had approved the Pfizer vaccine for children as young as five, providing another barrier against the deadly disease’s spread, and Covid rates declined. But while the wall against the disease in the U.S. is growing, it is not finished. As cases surge as the Omicron variant spreads around the country, building that wall and reinforcing it with booster shots is critically important. In much of the rest of the world, the wall is severely lacking where populations haven’t been given decent access to the vaccine. Only 8 percent of individuals in low-income countries have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and a WHO Africa report from this fall said that on that continent, less than 10 percent of countries would hit the goal of vaccinating at least 40 percent of their citizens by the end of the year. Globally, less than 60 percent of the population has been vaccinated. The holes in vaccination coverage will allow the virus to continue to kill a large number of individuals, and allow an environment where possibly other dangerous variants can emerge.

Perseverance Notches Firsts on Mars

NASA took a huge step forward in exploring the Red Planet after the rover Perseverance landed safely on Mars in February. Scientists outfitted the vehicle with an ultralight helicopter that successfully flew in the thin Martian atmosphere , a toaster-sized device called MOXIE that successfully converted carbon dioxide to oxygen , and sampling elements that successfully collected rocks from the planet’s floor. All of the achievements will lend themselves to a better understanding of Mars, and how to investigate it in the future. The flight success will give scientists clues on how to build larger helicopters, the oxygen creation will help scientists come up with grander plans for conversion devices, and the rocks will make their way back to Earth for analysis when they are picked up on a future mission. In addition to the rover’s triumphs, other countries notched major firsts too. The United Arab Emirates Hope space probe successfully entered orbit around the planet and is studying the Martian atmosphere and weather. China’s Zhurong rover landed on Mars in May and is exploring the planet’s geology and looking for signs of water. With these ongoing missions, scientists around the world are learning more and more about what the planet is like and how we might better explore it, maybe one day in person.

Is “Dragon Man” a New Species of Human?

The backstory of the skull that scientists used to suggest there was a new species of later Pleistocene human—to join Homo sapiens and Neanderthals—garnered a lot of ink. After the fossil was discovered at a construction site in China nearly 90 years ago, a family hid it until a farmer gave it to a university museum in 2018. Since then, scientists in China pored over the skull—analyzing its features, conducting uranium series dating, and using X-ray fluorescence to compare it to other fossils—before declaring it a new species of archaic human. They dubbed the discovery Homo longi , or “Dragon Man.” The skull had a large cranium capable of holding a big brain, a thick brow and almost square eye sockets—details scientists used to differentiate it from other Homo species. Some scientists questioned whether the find warranted designation as a new species. “It’s exciting because it is a really interesting cranium, and it does have some things to say about human evolution and what’s going on in Asia. But it’s also disappointing that it’s 90 years out from discovery, and it is just an isolated cranium, and you’re not quite sure exactly how old it is or where it fits,” Michael Petraglia of the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Initiative told Smithsonian magazine back in June. Other scientists supported the new species designation, and so the debate continues, and likely will until more fossils are discovered that help to fill in the holes of human history.

Climate Change Wreaks Havoc on Coral Reefs

Increasing natural disasters—forest fires, droughts and heat waves—may be the most noticeable events spurred by climate change; a warming Earth has helped drive a five-fold uptick in such weather-related events over the last 50 years according the a 2021 report by the World Meteorological Organization . But one of the biggest impacts wrought by climate change over the past decade has occurred underwater. Warming temps cause coral reefs to discard the symbiotic algae that help them survive, and they bleach and die. This year a major report from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network announced that the oceans lost about 14 percent of their reefs in the decade after 2009, mostly because of climate change. In November, new research showed that less than 2 percent of the coral reefs on the Great Barrier Reef—the world’s largest such feature—escaped bleaching since 1998. That news came just two months after a different study stated that half of coral reefs have been lost since the 1950s , in part due to climate change. The reef declines impact fisheries, local economies based on tourism and coastal developments—which lose the offshore buffer zone from storms the living structures provide. Scientists say if temperatures continue to rise, coral reefs are in serious danger. But not all hope is lost—if humans reduce carbon emissions rapidly now, more reefs will have a better chance of surviving .

The Space Tourism Race Heats Up

This year the famous billionaires behind the space tourism race completed successful missions that boosted more than just their egos. They put a host of civilians in space. Early in July, billionaire Richard Branson and his employees flew just above the boundary of space—a suborbital flight—in Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed trip. (But Virgin Galactic did delay commercial missions until at least late next year.) Just over a week after Branson’s mission, the world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, completed Blue Origin’s first crewed suborbital flight with the youngest and oldest travelers to reach space. In October, his company Blue Origin repeated the feat when it took Star Trek actor William Shatner up. A month before that, a crew of four became the first all-civilian crew to circle the Earth from space in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon capsule Resilience. More ambitious firsts for civilians are in the works. In 2022, SpaceX plans to send a retired astronaut and three paying passengers to the International Space Station. And beyond that, Bezos announced Blue Origin hopes to deploy a private space station fit for ten—called “Orbital Reef”—sometime between 2025 and 2030.

WHO Approves First Vaccine Against Malaria

In October, the World Health Organization approved the first vaccine against malaria. The approval was not only a first for that disease, but also for any parasitic disease. The moment was 30 years in the making, as Mosquirix—the brand name of the drug— cost more than $750 million since 1987 to develop and test. Malaria kills nearly a half million individuals a year, including 260,000 children under the age of five. Most of these victims live in sub-Saharan Africa. The new vaccine fights the deadliest of five malaria pathogens and the most prevalent in Africa, and is administered to children under five in a series of four injections. The vaccine is not a silver bullet; it prevents only about 30 percent of severe malaria cases. But one modeling study showed that still could prevent 5.4 million cases and 23,000 deaths in children under five each year. Experts say the vaccine is a valuable tool that should be used in conjunction with existing methods—such as drug combination treatments and insecticide-treated bed nets—to combat the deadly disease.

Discoveries Move Key Dates Back for Humans in the Americas

Two very different papers in two of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals documented key moments of human habitation in the Americas. In September, a study in Science dated footprints found at White Sands National Park to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Researchers estimated the age of the dried tracks known as “ghost prints” using radiocarbon dating of dried ditchgrass seeds found above and below the impressions. Previously, many archaeologists placed the start of human life in the Americas at around 13,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, based on tools found in New Mexico. The new paper, whose results have been debated , suggests humans actually lived on the continent at the height of the Ice Age. A month after that surprising find, a study in Nature published evidence showing that Vikings lived on North America earlier than previously thought. Researchers examined cut wood left by the explorers at a site in Newfoundland and found evidence in the samples of a cosmic ray event that happened in 993 C.E. The scientists then counted the rings out from that mark and discovered the wood had been cut in 1021 C.E. The find means that the Norse explorers completed the first known crossing of the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas.

Humans Are Affecting the Evolution of Animals

New research published this year shows that humans have both directly and indirectly affected how animals evolve. In probably the starkest example of humans impacting animal evolution, a Science study found a sharp increase in tuskless African elephants after years of poaching. During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, poachers killed so many of the giant mammals with tusks that those females without the long ivory teeth were more likely to pass on their genes. Before the war, 20 percent were tuskless. Now, roughly half of the female elephants are tuskless. Males who have the genetic make-up for tusklessness die , likely before they are born. And killing animals isn’t the only way humans are impacting evolution. A large study in Trends in Ecology and Evolution found that animals are changing shape to deal with rising temps. For example, over various time periods bats grew bigger wings and rabbits sprouted longer ears—both likely to dissipate more heat into the surrounding air. More evidence along those lines was published later in the year in Science Advances . A 40-year-study of birds in a remote, intact patch of Amazon rainforest showed 77 species weighed less on average, and many had longer wings, than they used to. Scientists said the changes likely occurred due to rising temperatures and changes in rainfall.

Antiviral Pills That Fight Covid Show Promising Results

Almost a year after scientists released tests showing the success of mRNA vaccines in fighting Covid, Merck released promising interim test results from a Phase III trial of an antiviral pill. On October 1, the pharmaceutical giant presented data that suggested molnupiravir could cut hospitalizations in half. Ten days later, the company submitted results to the FDA in hopes of gaining emergency use. In mid-November, the U.K. jumped ahead of the U.S. and granted approval for the treatment. By late November, advisers to the FDA recommended emergency authorization of the pill, though it was shown by this time to reduce death or disease by 30—not 50—percent. The drug should be taken —four pills a day for five days—starting within five days of the appearance of symptoms. It works by disrupting SARS-CoV-2’s ability to replicate effectively inside a human cell.

Molnupiravir isn’t the only viral drug with positive results. In November, Pfizer announced its antiviral pill, Paxlovid, was effective against severe Covid. By December, the pharmaceutical giant shared final results that it reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 88 percent in a key group. News about both pills was welcome , as they are expected to work against all versions of the virus, including Omicron. Though the drugs aren’t as big of a breakthrough as the vaccines, a doctor writing for the New Yorker called them “the most important pharmacologic advance of the pandemic.” Many wealthy countries have already agreed to contracts for molnupiravir, and the Gates Foundation pledged $120 million to help get the pill to poor countries. If approved and distributed fast enough, the oral antivirals can be prescribed in places, like Africa, where vaccines have been lacking. The pills represent another crucial tool, in addition to masks and vaccines, in the fight against Covid.

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Joe Spring is the associate digital science editor for Smithsonian magazine.

The 10 best research stories of 2021

Is the year over already?

2021 brought its fair share of big news and research breakthroughs, COVID and non-COVID alike. Given UC is the  global leader in cited scholarship , it’s no surprise that each campus produced numerous new ways of understanding our world.

We’ve rounded up some of the best stories from each campus: Some were extensively covered by the media, like UC San Francisco’s novel treatment for severe depression; others were underrated but deserving of more attention, like UC Santa Cruz’s study on the social factors that affect teen gender identity. Together, these stories show how the University of California propels research that changes the world.

1. Curing sickle cell disease (UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Francisco)

Using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology discovered by UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, physicians are launching clinical trials aimed at correcting the defect that causes sickle cell disease. The inherited blood disorder, which is painful and often fatal, affects about 1 in every 365 Black or African American births. The trials will be led by doctors at UCSF and UCLA and are expected to begin by mid-2022. Tapping into UCLA’s expertise in genetic analysis and cell manufacturing and the decades-long expertise at  UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland  in cord blood and marrow transplantation and sickle cell gene therapy, they have the potential to create a cure for sickle cell disease that is both affordable and accessible. Doudna won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020 for the CRISPR technology that makes these trials possible. This research is being funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-led Cure Sickle Cell Initiative, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Learn more:   https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/fda-approves-first-test-crispr-correct-genetic-defect-causing-sickle-cell-disease  and  https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/03/420137/uc-consortium-launches-first-clinical-trial-using-crispr-correct-gene-defect

2. A new type of supernova (UC Santa Barbara)

Scientists found the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion — an electron-capture supernova. The concept of an electron-capture supernova had been theorized for 40 years without any real-world proof. The discovery, led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory, has been called the Rosetta Stone of astrophysics because it is helping scientists decode thousand-year-old records from cultures around the world, including a supernova from A.D. 1045 so bright it was seen for 23 days, even at daytime.

Learn more:   https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2021/020338/goldilocks-supernova

3. Social factors affect teen gender expression (UC Santa Cruz)

A UC Santa Cruz study showed that a growing number of Gen Z teens are identifying as nonbinary — but this is influenced by regional differences in levels of resources, rights, and visibility for sexual and gender diversity. While almost 25 percent of the LGBTQ+ youth surveyed expressed some form of nonbinary gender, it was more prevalent in those who lived in the Bay Area compared to the Central Valley. Additionally, teens who were assigned female at birth seemed more comfortable with these forms of gender expression, whereas those who were assigned male at birth faced strong pressures to conform to standards of masculinity. The research sheds light on factors that can support or hinder sexual and gender expression among teens.

Learn more:   https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/03/adolescent-gender-sexual-identity.html

4. Novel treatment for severe depression (UC San Francisco)

One of the most hopeful UC San Francisco stories this year was the successful treatment of severe, previously untreatable depression using customizable deep brain stimulation. Physicians were able to tap into a patient's unique brain circuit involved in her depression and interrupt it using the equivalent of a pacemaker for the brain. The breakthrough was hailed as a landmark in the years-long effort to apply advances in neuroscience to the treatment of psychiatric disorders. This precision medicine approach provided the patient with immediate, long-term symptom relief and could be transformative for other patients with chronic, treatment-resistant depression.

Learn more:   https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/hope-treatment-resistant-depression-brain-stimulation-demand

5. Tracking global wastewater testing for COVID-19 (UC Merced)

After the COVID-19 pandemic struck, scientists across the globe realized they could track the virus by testing sewage water. UC Merced professor Colleen Naughton pioneered a dashboard to host global findings, an innovation that earned her the 2021 Grand Prize in University Research by the American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists. Wastewater monitoring allows scientists to test an entire group of people for COVID-19, not just one person at a time. It has also been shown to be effective at predicting outbreaks of COVID-19. Many cities, universities and countries have now adopted this testing approach and have reinforced the value of Naughton’s dashboard by sharing their results.

Learn more:   https://news.ucmerced.edu/news/2021/naughton-lab-creates-dashboard-track-global-wastewater-testing-covid-19

6. Increased wildfire linked to human-induced climate change (UCLA)

Wildfires have been increasing over the last two decades. But how much of that trend has been caused by human-induced climate change and how much could be explained by other factors? This year, scientists from UCLA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory set out to find answers. They analyzed a key variable tied to wildfire risk known as “vapor pressure deficit” — a term that reflects warm, dry air — and determined that 68 percent of the increase in vapor pressure deficit across the western U.S. between 1979 and 2020 was likely due to human-caused global warming. This suggests that human-induced climate change is the culprit for increasing fire weather in the western United States and that the trend is likely to worsen in the years ahead.

Learn more:   https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/frequent-wildfires-human-caused-climate-change

7. Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions (UC Davis)

Of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., 10 percent comes from agriculture — and half of that from cows and other ruminant animals belching methane throughout the day as they digest. In 2018, researchers from UC Davis were able to reduce methane emissions from dairy cows by over 50 percent by supplementing their diet with seaweed for two weeks. The seaweed inhibits an enzyme in the cow’s digestive system that contributes to methane production. This year, they tested whether those reductions were sustainable over time by feeding cows a touch of seaweed every day for five months. The results were clear: Cattle that consumed seaweed emitted much less methane, and there was no drop-off in efficacy over time.

Learn more: https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions-82-percent

8. Flame retardants linked to autistic-like behavior (UC Riverside)

Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, are a class of ubiquitous fire-retardant chemicals, found in upholstery, carpets, curtains, electronics and even infant products. Thanks to the inadvertent digestion of contaminated household dust, they can also be detected in breast milk around the world. A research team led by UC Riverside scientists found that when female mice exposed to PBDEs pass on these chemicals to their developing offspring, the female offspring show traits similar to autism spectrum disorders. In addition to shedding light on a potential cause of autism, the study signals the importance of toxicology studies so that chemicals like PBDEs can be investigated before they are commercially released.

Learn more: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/flame-retardants-linked-autistic-behavior

9. Plant extract to prevent morphine addiction (UC Irvine)

Over the past two decades, dramatic increases in opioid overdose mortality have occurred in the United States and other nations, with the COVID-19 pandemic only worsening the problem. A UC Irvine-led study has pointed to a possible new therapy in an unlikely place — YHS, an extract of the plant Corydalis yanhusuo, which prevents morphine tolerance and dependence while also reversing opiate addiction. Even better, YHS has been used as an analgesic in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. It is considered safe and readily available for purchase, either online or as a “botanical” in certain grocery stores. The extract could have an immediate, positive impact in curbing the opioid epidemic.

Learn more: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-irvine-led-study-finds-medicinal-plant-extract-prevent-morphine-addiction

10. No serious COVID-19 vaccine side effects in breastfeeding moms (UC San Diego)

Mothers who are breastfeeding can get vaccinated and still continue to breastfeed their babies, researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine reported. Researchers found that breastfeeding mothers who received either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccination reported the same localized symptoms as non-breastfeeding women, with no serious side effects in their breastfed infants. The results not only demonstrated that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were not red flags for breastfeeding mothers but encouraged lactating women to get the COVID-19 vaccine and to continue to breastfeed their infants: Thankfully, they did not have to choose one over the other.

Learn more: https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-09-08-study-no-serious-covid-19-vaccine-side-effects-in-breastfeeding-moms-infants.aspx

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Science News

These are the most-read science news stories of 2021.

The International Space Station spotted the origins of a bizarre type of upside-down lightning called a blue jet (illustrated) zipping up from a thundercloud into the stratosphere in 2019. The discovery ranked among  Science News ' most-read stories of 2021.

DTU SPACE, DANIEL SCHMELLING/MOUNT VISUAL

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By Science News Staff

December 23, 2021 at 9:00 am

Science News drew over 21 million visitors to our website this year. Here’s a rundown of the most-read news stories and long reads of 2021.

Top news stories

1. space station detectors found the source of weird ‘blue jet’ lightning.

Instruments on the International Space Station detected the origins of an odd type of lightning called a blue jet. The bizarre bolt is sparked by a “blue bang” — a flash of bright blue light that may be brought on by the turbulent mixing of oppositely charged regions within a thundercloud ( SN: 2/13/21, p. 14 ).

2. A newfound quasicrystal formed in the first atomic bomb test

The first atomic bomb test, in 1945, forged a peculiar, glassy material called trinitite — and within it, a rare form of matter called a quasicrystal . Quasicrystals’ atoms are arranged in an orderly structure like normal crystals, but the structure’s pattern doesn’t repeat ( SN: 6/19/21, p. 12 ).

3. An Indigenous people in the Philippines have the most Denisovan DNA

The Ayta Magbukon people in the Philippines set the record for the highest known level of Denisovan ancestry — about 5 percent of their DNA comes from the ancient hominids . The finding suggests that several Denisovan populations independently reached Southeast Asia and interbred with Homo sapiens groups that arrived thousands of years later ( SN: 9/11/21, p. 16 ).

4. Astronomers may have seen a star gulp down a black hole and explode

In a first, astronomers caught a glimpse of a rare double cosmic cannibalism : A star swallowed a black hole or neutron star, which then gobbled that star from within, resulting in an astonishing explosion ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 6 ).

5. Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines

Skin stem cells plucked from frog embryos organized themselves into miniature living robots, dubbed “xenobots,” that can swim, move around debris and even self-heal . Xenobots may one day serve a useful purpose, but ethical questions need to be considered ( SN: 4/24/21, p. 8 ).

Favorite video

Acrobatic rabbits bewitched online readers in our most-viewed YouTube video posted this year. The video — accompanying the story “ A gene defect may make rabbits do handstands instead of hop ” ( SN: 4/24/21, p. 13 ) — shows a sauteur d’Alfort rabbit walking on its front paws (below). Such hop-less bunnies may have adopted the odd gait because of a mutation in a gene called RORB , scientists discovered.

Top feature stories

1. new drugs that block a brain chemical are game changers for some migraine sufferers.

A class of drugs that inhibits a neurotransmitter called calcitonin gene-related peptide is helping some patients who suffer from chronic, debilitating migraines ( SN: 3/27/21, p. 16 ).

2. Einstein’s theory of general relativity unveiled a dynamic and bizarre cosmos

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has served as the bedrock of our understanding of the cosmos. In the last 100 years, scientists have confirmed its most radical predictions, including black holes, gravitational waves and an expanding universe ( SN: 2/13/21, p. 16 ).

3. Chemists are reimagining recycling to keep plastics out of landfills

No matter people’s dedication to sorting and recycling plastics, most still end up in landfills because the materials are too difficult to transform into useful new products. Some chemists are trying to change that ( SN: 1/30/21, p. 20 ).

4. Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mind

In the last 100 years, psychologists and other social scientists have dug into the muddy “science of us” and developed conflicting theories about human thought and behavior. From the messy, contentious research bloomed insights into what makes humans tick ( SN: 8/14/21, p. 18 ).

5. Fossils and ancient DNA paint a vibrant picture of human origins

From the Taung Child to Lucy, the last century of paleoanthropology has sketched a rough timeline of how humans came to be. Scientists now agree that human evolution has its roots in Africa, but many mysteries in our history remain to be solved ( SN: 9/25/21, p. 20 ).

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The 10 Most Popular Articles of 2021

Many people began 2021 with optimism, hopeful that a COVID-19 vaccine would be widely available within months. Surely the pandemic would end soon, right?

It was, perhaps, a naïve thought in a pandemic-weary world. Nevertheless, companies around the globe took steps toward normalcy, returning to offices and forging new paths in hybrid and remote work models. Many workers decided they didn’t want to suffer through long commutes or return to jobs they hated and joined the “Great Resignation.” And ultimately, virus variants and infection surges thwarted many thoughtful workplace plans.

Not surprisingly, the 10 most-read articles on Harvard Business School Working Knowledge reflected the mood swings of another challenging, complex year for managers and employees everywhere.

The 10 most popular articles

1. COVID Killed the Traditional Workplace. What Should Companies Do Now? To mark the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, 13 HBS faculty members offered advice on everything from time management to employee mental health for companies trying to prepare for the “next normal.”

2. For Entrepreneurs, the Benefits of Slowing Down Even as the pandemic loomed large over the global economy, venture capital investment continued at a steady clip. After several heady months for startups, Jeffrey Bussgang offered radical advice for founders: just chill.

3. The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2021 At the start of a summer brimming with vaccine-fueled promise, many people looked forward to taking delayed vacations. HBS faculty members shared books they planned to read during their downtime, pulling from the worlds of technology, history, and science fiction.

4. How to Learn from the Big Mistake You Almost Make A brush with disaster can lead to important innovations, but only if employees have the psychological safety to reflect on these close calls, says research by Amy C. Edmondson , Olivia Jung , and colleagues.

5. How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves Aggressive downsizing at France Télécom culminated in 19 employee suicides. Case studies by Cynthia Montgomery and Ashley Whillans show how mistreating workers can have deadly consequences.

6. Dying to Lead: How Reaching the Top Can Kill You Sooner A study of General Electric employees by Tom Nicholas shows how the stress of chasing professional success can shorten an executive's life.

7. Commuting Hurts Productivity and Your Best Talent Suffers Most Companies that prize innovation should keep employees out of soul-crushing transit, even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, suggests research by Andy Wu .

8. The Hard Truth About Being a CEO CEOs rarely get the full story from advisers and don't seem to know when to step down, says David Fubini . His book Hidden Truths offers candid wisdom for leaders.

9. Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees Many companies want employees back at desks, but workers want more flexibility than ever. Tsedal Neeley offers three rules for senior managers trying to forge a new hybrid path.

10. When Your Nerves Get the Best of You, Change the Narrative Anxiety can hobble even the most confident leaders. Francesca Gino offers three strategies that she uses to turn nerve-wracking situations into meaningful experiences.

Browse the most popular articles of 2020 >

[Image: Unsplash/Joshua Fuller]

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The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2021

From reframing our notion of “good” schools to mining the magic of expert teachers, here’s a curated list of must-read research from 2021.

It was a year of unprecedented hardship for teachers and school leaders. We pored through hundreds of studies to see if we could follow the trail of exactly what happened: The research revealed a complex portrait of a grueling year during which persistent issues of burnout and mental and physical health impacted millions of educators. Meanwhile, many of the old debates continued: Does paper beat digital? Is project-based learning as effective as direct instruction? How do you define what a “good” school is?

Other studies grabbed our attention, and in a few cases, made headlines. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University turned artificial intelligence loose on some 1,130 award-winning children’s books in search of invisible patterns of bias. (Spoiler alert: They found some.) Another study revealed why many parents are reluctant to support social and emotional learning in schools—and provided hints about how educators can flip the script.

1. What Parents Fear About SEL (and How to Change Their Minds)

When researchers at the Fordham Institute asked parents to rank phrases associated with social and emotional learning , nothing seemed to add up. The term “social-emotional learning” was very unpopular; parents wanted to steer their kids clear of it. But when the researchers added a simple clause, forming a new phrase—”social-emotional & academic learning”—the program shot all the way up to No. 2 in the rankings.

What gives?

Parents were picking up subtle cues in the list of SEL-related terms that irked or worried them, the researchers suggest. Phrases like “soft skills” and “growth mindset” felt “nebulous” and devoid of academic content. For some, the language felt suspiciously like “code for liberal indoctrination.”

But the study suggests that parents might need the simplest of reassurances to break through the political noise. Removing the jargon, focusing on productive phrases like “life skills,” and relentlessly connecting SEL to academic progress puts parents at ease—and seems to save social and emotional learning in the process.

2. The Secret Management Techniques of Expert Teachers

In the hands of experienced teachers, classroom management can seem almost invisible: Subtle techniques are quietly at work behind the scenes, with students falling into orderly routines and engaging in rigorous academic tasks almost as if by magic. 

That’s no accident, according to new research . While outbursts are inevitable in school settings, expert teachers seed their classrooms with proactive, relationship-building strategies that often prevent misbehavior before it erupts. They also approach discipline more holistically than their less-experienced counterparts, consistently reframing misbehavior in the broader context of how lessons can be more engaging, or how clearly they communicate expectations.

Focusing on the underlying dynamics of classroom behavior—and not on surface-level disruptions—means that expert teachers often look the other way at all the right times, too. Rather than rise to the bait of a minor breach in etiquette, a common mistake of new teachers, they tend to play the long game, asking questions about the origins of misbehavior, deftly navigating the terrain between discipline and student autonomy, and opting to confront misconduct privately when possible.

3. The Surprising Power of Pretesting

Asking students to take a practice test before they’ve even encountered the material may seem like a waste of time—after all, they’d just be guessing.

But new research concludes that the approach, called pretesting, is actually more effective than other typical study strategies. Surprisingly, pretesting even beat out taking practice tests after learning the material, a proven strategy endorsed by cognitive scientists and educators alike. In the study, students who took a practice test before learning the material outperformed their peers who studied more traditionally by 49 percent on a follow-up test, while outperforming students who took practice tests after studying the material by 27 percent.

The researchers hypothesize that the “generation of errors” was a key to the strategy’s success, spurring student curiosity and priming them to “search for the correct answers” when they finally explored the new material—and adding grist to a 2018 study that found that making educated guesses helped students connect background knowledge to new material.

Learning is more durable when students do the hard work of correcting misconceptions, the research suggests, reminding us yet again that being wrong is an important milestone on the road to being right.

4. Confronting an Old Myth About Immigrant Students

Immigrant students are sometimes portrayed as a costly expense to the education system, but new research is systematically dismantling that myth.

In a 2021 study , researchers analyzed over 1.3 million academic and birth records for students in Florida communities, and concluded that the presence of immigrant students actually has “a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students,” raising test scores as the size of the immigrant school population increases. The benefits were especially powerful for low-income students.

While immigrants initially “face challenges in assimilation that may require additional school resources,” the researchers concluded, hard work and resilience may allow them to excel and thus “positively affect exposed U.S.-born students’ attitudes and behavior.” But according to teacher Larry Ferlazzo, the improvements might stem from the fact that having English language learners in classes improves pedagogy , pushing teachers to consider “issues like prior knowledge, scaffolding, and maximizing accessibility.”

5. A Fuller Picture of What a ‘Good’ School Is

It’s time to rethink our definition of what a “good school” is, researchers assert in a study published in late 2020.⁣ That’s because typical measures of school quality like test scores often provide an incomplete and misleading picture, the researchers found.

The study looked at over 150,000 ninth-grade students who attended Chicago public schools and concluded that emphasizing the social and emotional dimensions of learning—relationship-building, a sense of belonging, and resilience, for example—improves high school graduation and college matriculation rates for both high- and low-income students, beating out schools that focus primarily on improving test scores.⁣

“Schools that promote socio-emotional development actually have a really big positive impact on kids,” said lead researcher C. Kirabo Jackson in an interview with Edutopia . “And these impacts are particularly large for vulnerable student populations who don’t tend to do very well in the education system.”

The findings reinforce the importance of a holistic approach to measuring student progress, and are a reminder that schools—and teachers—can influence students in ways that are difficult to measure, and may only materialize well into the future.⁣

6. Teaching Is Learning

One of the best ways to learn a concept is to teach it to someone else. But do you actually have to step into the shoes of a teacher, or does the mere expectation of teaching do the trick?

In a 2021 study , researchers split students into two groups and gave them each a science passage about the Doppler effect—a phenomenon associated with sound and light waves that explains the gradual change in tone and pitch as a car races off into the distance, for example. One group studied the text as preparation for a test; the other was told that they’d be teaching the material to another student.

The researchers never carried out the second half of the activity—students read the passages but never taught the lesson. All of the participants were then tested on their factual recall of the Doppler effect, and their ability to draw deeper conclusions from the reading.

The upshot? Students who prepared to teach outperformed their counterparts in both duration and depth of learning, scoring 9 percent higher on factual recall a week after the lessons concluded, and 24 percent higher on their ability to make inferences. The research suggests that asking students to prepare to teach something—or encouraging them to think “could I teach this to someone else?”—can significantly alter their learning trajectories.

7. A Disturbing Strain of Bias in Kids’ Books

Some of the most popular and well-regarded children’s books—Caldecott and Newbery honorees among them—persistently depict Black, Asian, and Hispanic characters with lighter skin, according to new research .

Using artificial intelligence, researchers combed through 1,130 children’s books written in the last century, comparing two sets of diverse children’s books—one a collection of popular books that garnered major literary awards, the other favored by identity-based awards. The software analyzed data on skin tone, race, age, and gender.

Among the findings: While more characters with darker skin color begin to appear over time, the most popular books—those most frequently checked out of libraries and lining classroom bookshelves—continue to depict people of color in lighter skin tones. More insidiously, when adult characters are “moral or upstanding,” their skin color tends to appear lighter, the study’s lead author, Anjali Aduki,  told The 74 , with some books converting “Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige.” Female characters, meanwhile, are often seen but not heard.

Cultural representations are a reflection of our values, the researchers conclude: “Inequality in representation, therefore, constitutes an explicit statement of inequality of value.”

8. The Never-Ending ‘Paper Versus Digital’ War

The argument goes like this: Digital screens turn reading into a cold and impersonal task; they’re good for information foraging, and not much more. “Real” books, meanwhile, have a heft and “tactility”  that make them intimate, enchanting—and irreplaceable.

But researchers have often found weak or equivocal evidence for the superiority of reading on paper. While a recent study concluded that paper books yielded better comprehension than e-books when many of the digital tools had been removed, the effect sizes were small. A 2021 meta-analysis further muddies the water: When digital and paper books are “mostly similar,” kids comprehend the print version more readily—but when enhancements like motion and sound “target the story content,” e-books generally have the edge.

Nostalgia is a force that every new technology must eventually confront. There’s plenty of evidence that writing with pen and paper encodes learning more deeply than typing. But new digital book formats come preloaded with powerful tools that allow readers to annotate, look up words, answer embedded questions, and share their thinking with other readers.

We may not be ready to admit it, but these are precisely the kinds of activities that drive deeper engagement, enhance comprehension, and leave us with a lasting memory of what we’ve read. The future of e-reading, despite the naysayers, remains promising.

9. New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

Many classrooms today still look like they did 100 years ago, when students were preparing for factory jobs. But the world’s moved on: Modern careers demand a more sophisticated set of skills—collaboration, advanced problem-solving, and creativity, for example—and those can be difficult to teach in classrooms that rarely give students the time and space to develop those competencies.

Project-based learning (PBL) would seem like an ideal solution. But critics say PBL places too much responsibility on novice learners, ignoring the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction and ultimately undermining subject fluency. Advocates counter that student-centered learning and direct instruction can and should coexist in classrooms.

Now two new large-scale studies —encompassing over 6,000 students in 114 diverse schools across the nation—provide evidence that a well-structured, project-based approach boosts learning for a wide range of students.

In the studies, which were funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia , elementary and high school students engaged in challenging projects that had them designing water systems for local farms, or creating toys using simple household objects to learn about gravity, friction, and force. Subsequent testing revealed notable learning gains—well above those experienced by students in traditional classrooms—and those gains seemed to raise all boats, persisting across socioeconomic class, race, and reading levels.

10. Tracking a Tumultuous Year for Teachers

The Covid-19 pandemic cast a long shadow over the lives of educators in 2021, according to a year’s worth of research.

The average teacher’s workload suddenly “spiked last spring,” wrote the Center for Reinventing Public Education in its January 2021 report, and then—in defiance of the laws of motion—simply never let up. By the fall, a RAND study recorded an astonishing shift in work habits: 24 percent of teachers reported that they were working 56 hours or more per week, compared to 5 percent pre-pandemic.

The vaccine was the promised land, but when it arrived nothing seemed to change. In an April 2021 survey  conducted four months after the first vaccine was administered in New York City, 92 percent of teachers said their jobs were more stressful than prior to the pandemic, up from 81 percent in an earlier survey.

It wasn’t just the length of the work days; a close look at the research reveals that the school system’s failure to adjust expectations was ruinous. It seemed to start with the obligations of hybrid teaching, which surfaced in Edutopia ’s coverage of overseas school reopenings. In June 2020, well before many U.S. schools reopened, we reported that hybrid teaching was an emerging problem internationally, and warned that if the “model is to work well for any period of time,” schools must “recognize and seek to reduce the workload for teachers.” Almost eight months later, a 2021 RAND study identified hybrid teaching as a primary source of teacher stress in the U.S., easily outpacing factors like the health of a high-risk loved one.

New and ever-increasing demands for tech solutions put teachers on a knife’s edge. In several important 2021 studies, researchers concluded that teachers were being pushed to adopt new technology without the “resources and equipment necessary for its correct didactic use.” Consequently, they were spending more than 20 hours a week adapting lessons for online use, and experiencing an unprecedented erosion of the boundaries between their work and home lives, leading to an unsustainable “always on” mentality. When it seemed like nothing more could be piled on—when all of the lights were blinking red—the federal government restarted standardized testing .

Change will be hard; many of the pathologies that exist in the system now predate the pandemic. But creating strict school policies that separate work from rest, eliminating the adoption of new tech tools without proper supports, distributing surveys regularly to gauge teacher well-being, and above all listening to educators to identify and confront emerging problems might be a good place to start, if the research can be believed.

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The 10 Most Popular Articles in 2021 (So Far)

Leading through change, hybrid work environments, and developing strategy for the post-pandemic era are among the most popular topics for readers in recent months.

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Following one of the most disruptive years in recent memory, 2021 has offered up many challenges and questions for managers: How can they keep teams safe and engaged in their work when they return to offices? How can they develop new skills and strategies at a time when things aren’t quite back to normal?

In the first half of the year, the most popular topics among readers have dived into answering these types of questions, with a focus on returning to physical offices, implementing hybrid work models, and redesigning organizational culture and strategy for the post-pandemic era. Other core issues for readers include understanding employee productivity and resilience, overcoming leadership failure, and developing strategies that can stand up against uncertainty and change.

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The following are the 10 most popular articles of the year so far. We hope they are inspiring and instructive for you and your teams in the months ahead.

#1 The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal

Robert hooijberg and michael watkins.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven a transformation in the ways we work by accelerating a shift to hybrid virtual and in-person models and requiring a fundamental change in the skills team leaders need to succeed. Leaders will need to play four roles as they adapt to managing a hybrid workforce.

#2 Redesigning the Post-Pandemic Workplace

Gerald c. kane, rich nanda, anh phillips, and jonathan copulsky.

As organizations plan for ways to bring remote employees back to the workplace, they should take advantage of the opportunity to rethink how and where work is best done, and how to combine the best aspects of remote and colocated work.

#3 The Future of Work Is Through Workforce Ecosystems

Elizabeth j. altman, david kiron, jeff schwartz, and robin jones.

Today’s leaders need best practices for dealing strategically and operationally with a distributed, diverse workforce that crosses internal and external boundaries. The authors contend that the best way to address the shift to managing all types of workers is through the lens of a workforce ecosystem — a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

About the Author

Ally MacDonald ( @allymacdonald ) is senior editor at MIT Sloan Management Review .

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These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2021

These emerging tech are poised to impact the world in the next three to five years. Image:  World Economic Forum

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Bernard meyerson.

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Stay up to date:, emerging technologies.

• The 10 th anniversary edition of the World Economic Forum’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies Report lists new technologies poised to impact the world in the next three to five years.
• Experts convened by the World Economic Forum and Scientific American highlight technological advances that could revolutionize agriculture, health and space.
• Self-fertilizing crops, on-demand drug manufacturing, breath-sensing diagnostics and 3D-printed houses are among the technologies on the list.

At COP26, countries committed to new, ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions this decade. Delivering on these promises will rely on the development and scale up of green technologies.

Two such technologies – the production of “green” ammonia and engineered crops that make their own fertilizer – both aiming to make agriculture more sustainable, made it onto this year’s list of emerging tech.

Top 10 Emerging Technologies

From breath sensors that can diagnose disease to wireless charging of low-powered devices, this year’s list of top emerging technologies is packed with inspiring advances related to the environment, health, infrastructure and connectivity. Experts whittled down scores of nominations to a select group of new developments with the potential to disrupt the status quo and spur real progress.

Have you read?

Emerging technologies: 10 years of top tech trends and how they've changed the world.

Here are 2021’s top 10 emerging technologies:

Decarbonization Rises

A century since scientists proposed that excess carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere would cause it to retain heat and cause planetary warming, a global effort is underway to drive decarbonization in all aspects of daily life. Governments and industries have made seminal commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

Meeting those commitments will, over the next three to five years, demand unprecedented innovation and scaling to industrial levels of nascent technologies such as: mass energy storage, low/no carbon chemical sources, revitalized rail transport, carbon sequestration, low carbon agriculture, zero emission vehicles and power sources, as well as agreed-upon compliance monitoring on a global scale.

Crops that make their own fertilizer

Today the world uses more than 110 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer to enhance crop production annually. What if crops could capture nitrogen on their own, "fixing" it to themselves in the form of ammonia as legumes such as soy and beans do? Being one of the top emerging technologies, researchers now aim to coax other crops such as corn and other cereals to also self-fertilize.

In one approach, researchers are working to emulate the symbiotic molecular communication between legumes and bacteria to create root nodules—legumes’ natural fertilizer factories. In another, soil bacteria that normally colonize cereal roots (but don’t normally create nodules) are taught to produce nitrogenase, a key component that converts atmospheric nitrogen to plant-compatible ammonia.

Diagnosing diseases with a puff of breath

Soon, testing for disease could be as simple for patients as exhaling. New breath sensors can diagnose diseases by sampling the concentrations of the more than 800 compounds contained in human breath. For instance, elevated amounts of acetone in human breath indicate diabetes mellitus. The sensors look for changes in electrical resistance as breath compounds flow over a metal-oxide semiconductor. Algorithms then analyze the sensor data.

While this emerging technology needs refinements before it can become widespread, in a March 2020 study in Wuhan, China, sensors achieved a remarkable 95 percent accuracy in COVID-19 detection and 100% sensitivity in differentiating patients.

Making pharmaceuticals on demand

Medicines today are generally made in large batches, in a multi-step process with different parts dispersed in locations around the world. It can take months to complete the process, involving hundreds of tons of material, which creates some challenges in consistency and reliable supply. Advances in microfluidics and on-demand drug manufacturing now enable a small but increasing number of common pharmaceuticals to be made as needed.

Also called continuous-flow manufacture, the process moves ingredients via tubes into small reaction chambers. The drugs can be made in portable machines in remote locations or field hospitals, with doses tailored to individual patients, a remaining challenge is reducing the high cost of this emerging technology.

Energy from wireless signals

The Internet of Things (IoT) is comprised of billions of electronic devices leveraging Internet connectivity for some aspect of their functionality. IoT sensors, often extremely low power devices that report data critical to our daily lives, are a challenge to keep charged, as batteries are of finite life and, once deployed, local environments often may not allow physical contact.

With the advent of 5G now providing wireless signals of adequate power, a tiny antenna within IoT sensors can “harvest” energy from such signals. A precursor of this emerging tech has long been in use in automated “tags” that are powered by radio signals emitted when drivers pass through toll stations.

Engineering a longer “healthspan”

The percentage of the global population aged 60 and over will nearly double, from 12 to 22 percent, between 2015 and 2050, predicts the World Health Organization. Aging is associated with both acute and chronic ailments such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and heart disease.

Researchers have shown an early understanding of aging’s molecular mechanisms, which could help us lead lives that are not just longer, but healthier as well. Using omics technologies (which can simultaneously quantify all gene activity or the concentration of all proteins in a cell, for instance) and insights from epigenetics, researchers can identify biological markers that are strong predictors of disease—presenting targets for proactive therapies.

Ammonia goes green

To feed the world, crops often require fertilizer produced from ammonia—lots of it. Synthesizing ammonia for fertilizer involves an energy-intensive method called the Haber-Bosch process, requiring a massive supply of hydrogen. Much of hydrogen today is produced by electrolysis, the splitting of water molecules employing electrical power, or by the high temperature cracking of hydrocarbons. The energy required to drive both methods currently results in the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

As renewable energy sources are now becoming prevalent, a “green” variant of hydrogen is being created without the release of greenhouse gases. In addition to eliminating excess atmospheric carbon, green hydrogen is free of contaminating chemicals that would otherwise be incorporated when using fossil fuels as a source, that purity enabling more efficient catalysis to promote ammonia production.

Biomarker devices go wireless

Nobody likes needles. However, numerous common acute and chronic conditions require frequent blood draws large and small to monitor biomarkers important in tracking progress in cancer treatments, diabetes, and other conditions. Advances in low power wireless communications, as well as novel chemical sensing techniques employing both optical and electronic probes, are enabling the continuous, non-invasive monitoring of critical medical information.

More than 100 companies have deployed or are developing wireless biomarker sensing devices across a spectrum of applications, with a focus on diabetes given its global prevalence. Wireless connectivity adds the virtue of data being instantly available, if needed, for a remotely located medical professional to intervene.

Houses printed with local materials

Fabricating homes using massively scaled 3D printers is already seeing limited deployment in the U.S. and other developed nations. In the developing world, where limited infrastructure makes shipping in materials a challenge, recent demonstrations using 3D printers take a leap ahead by employing locally sourced materials, clay, sand and local fibers to print structures—eliminating roughly 95% of material requiring transport to a building site.

This emerging technology could provide rugged shelters in remote regions, where housing needs are dire and no viable transport networks exist. The result could be a game changer for nations that are often otherwise left behind.

Space connects the globe

Sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT) can record and report vital information about weather, soil conditions, moisture levels, crop health, social activities, and countless other valuable data sets. With the recent advent of countless low-cost microsatellites in low earth orbit able to capture such data globally and download it to central facilities for processing, the IoT will enable unprecedented levels of global understanding—encompassing previously inaccessible developing regions devoid of traditional Internet infrastructure.

Challenges such as lower-power secure data links and the issue of short-lived low earth orbit satellites remain, but steady progress promises global deployment in the coming three to five years.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The Year’s Most Read

The stories you read, clicked and spent the most time with.

By the staff of The Morning

The most-read New York Times story of 2021 captured the ennui that many people felt during the second year of the pandemic. “There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling,” as the article’s headline put it. “It’s called languishing.”

In the article , Adam Grant, a psychologist and author, described languishing as “the neglected middle child of mental health” and “the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being.” He concluded: “By acknowledging that so many of us are languishing, we can start giving voice to quiet despair and lighting a path out of the void.”

This year was not an easy one, and you’ll be reminded of that as you look through our lists of the most popular Times stories of 2021. But we think there is value in looking back — and we expect that you will also find some moments of joy.

We’re adding a couple of twists to this year’s rankings. First, you’ll find the classic most-read list — the 10 Times articles with the largest number of page views. (The list does not include election-result pages, Covid-19 maps and some other standing features.)

Next you’ll see a list of 10 articles that people spent a particularly long time reading.

Finally, you’ll find a list of the 10 most-clicked articles from this newsletter.

The most-read

1. There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling: languishing . (April 19)

2. Alec Baldwin was told his gun was safe . (Oct. 21)

3. Mike Pence reached his limit with Donald Trump. (Jan. 12)

4. Oakland Raiders coach resigns after emails . (Oct. 11)

5. “A Total Failure”: The Proud Boys now mock Trump . (Jan. 20)

6. Long before divorce, Bill Gates had a questionable reputation . (May 16)

7. Harry Brant is dead at 24 . (Jan. 18)

8. Outage shakes Facebook . (Oct. 4)

9. J. & J. vaccinations were paused after rare clotting cases. (April 13)

10. His lights stayed on during Texas’ storm. Now he owes $16,752 . (Feb. 20)

Deep engagement

The following articles were among those with which readers spent the most time this year:

Martina Navratilova has plenty to say . (June 6)

Katie Couric’s memoir includes family skeletons . (Oct. 14)

When Dasani left home . (Sept. 28)

Four secrets about “ Raiders of the Lost Ark .” (June 11)

Maureen Dowd interviews Cindy Adams, gossip’s G.O.A.T. (Aug. 7)

A Madonna who shows the beauty in going overboard . (Aug. 13)

How to survive a bear attack . (Aug. 28)

Fifty reasons to love Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.” (June 20)

David Sedaris knows what you’ll laugh at when no one is judging. (Oct. 24)

What happens when elemental forces clash in Chicago ? (July 7)

What you clicked

These were the 10 articles that Morning readers visited the most in 2021:

1. Coronavirus in the U.S.: Maps and case counts .

2. How vaccinations are going in your county and state .

3. How safe are you from Covid when you fly ?

4. Masks, travel, hugs? Advice for the vaccinated .

5. Fifty-two places to love in 2021.

6. The 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

7. Girl, wash your timeline .

8. Which Covid vaccine should you get? Answers from experts .

9. This is how you get the best scrambled eggs .

10. Do we still need to keep wearing masks outdoors ?

THE LATEST NEWS

New York City schools will reopen on Jan. 3 with ramped-up testing. Several universities have delayed the start of classes .

Average daily new cases in the U.S. topped 267,000, a record. Hospitalizations and deaths are up, but they remain below the peaks of early 2021.

Hospitalizations among children have increased, but Omicron does not seem to be more severe for young people.

Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew Clyde have racked up more than $100,000 in fines for not wearing masks on the House floor.

Harry Reid died at 82 . The Nevada senator led a Democratic majority during Barack Obama’s presidency and steered the Affordable Care Act into law.

“The world is better cause of what you’ve done,” Obama wrote in a letter to Reid . “Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight.”

In 2019, The Times spoke with Reid about Washington, Trump and fighting dirty .

International

Record flooding in northeastern Brazil killed at least 20 people .

How do you rewrite a constitution for the climate change era? Chile is the first country to try .

Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the closure of a human rights group that chronicled persecutions in Stalin-era labor camps.

Hong Kong police arrested seven people connected to a pro-democracy news website , another crackdown on the city’s once-vibrant independent press.

Other Big Stories

John Madden, who coached the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl title and became one of football’s great broadcasters, died at 85 .

How “stacking” — piling tax breaks on top of one another — allows rich families to avoid paying millions .

Historians hoped to find a century-old photo of Abraham Lincoln in a time capsule in Virginia. (Spoiler: It wasn’t to be.)

Homelessness isn’t just traumatic, it’s also expensive , Lori Teresa Yearwood writes.

Poland’s government has co-opted the courts, muzzled the media and restricted women’s rights. It could be a vision of Europe’s future , Karolina Wigura and Jaroslaw Kuisz write.

MORNING READS

Games: The world’s best Tetris player is 14 years old .

Drumroll, please: The Times asked readers to pick the best book of the past 125 years. We’ve got a winner .

Icons: Nicole Kidman on playing Lucille Ball : “I’ve got to be funny, and funny’s hard.”

Science: From thieving birds to dexterous elephants, these were the year’s best animal discoveries .

Ask an ethicist: What to do if you’re invited to a wedding at a plantation .

Lives Lived: Thomas Lovejoy spent decades trying to preserve the Amazon rainforest. He also helped create the public TV series “Nature” and popularized the term “biological diversity.” Lovejoy died at 80 .

ARTS AND IDEAS

The n.f.l. playoff picture.

With two weeks left in the N.F.L. season, fans may be wondering whether their teams can make the playoffs. Wonder no more: The Upshot has once again rolled out its N.F.L. Playoff Simulator, which simulates the season thousands of times to figure out each team’s odds of making the postseason.

A few takeaways:

Six teams are officially in the postseason. But several others can probably start celebrating early: The Bills, Patriots, Titans and Colts all have a greater than 90 percent chance of getting in.

A few other teams are on the cusp — the Dolphins and Raiders in the A.F.C., the Eagles and 49ers in the N.F.C. For each of them, the path is clear: Win both remaining games and their playoff odds shoot up to 100 percent.

The Falcons and the Saints play in the same division, and they have the same record (7-8). But the simulator gives the Saints a 34 percent chance of making the playoffs, and the Falcons a lowly 2 percent.

Try the tool for yourself . Each team has its own page where you can choose who wins the remaining games and see how it changes the odds. — Tom Wright-Piersanti, a Morning editor

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to cook.

These skillet poached eggs aren’t perfect. ( And that’s OK .)

A Coco Chanel ballet slipper, Beethoven’s hair, Andy Warhol’s painted ticket: See delightful objects at the New York Public Library.

What to Read

“Brown Girls” by Daphne Palasi Andreades is a “brash and talky first novel.”

Now Time to Play

The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were gyrating and tarrying . Here is today’s puzzle — or you can play online .

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword , and a clue: “Looks ___ everything” (five letters).

If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

P.S. Jack Nicas, who has covered tech for The Times, will be the next Brazil bureau chief .

Here’s today’s front page .

Today’s episode of “ The Daily ” revisits a conversation with a Dogecoin millionaire.

Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at [email protected] .

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Top 10 Topics of 2021

Deirdre shevlin bell.

Health remained at the forefront of public discourse in 2021, and the  Natural Medicine Journal community continued to offer their expertise as the world tried to navigate the ever-shifting landscape. As we kick off a new year, let's take a look back at the content that garnered the most attention this past year: 

• What Practitioners Need to Know About the Covid-19 Vaccine
• Going Beyond the Hype of Hydrogen Water
• Covid-19 Insights: Ivermectin, Vaccine Shedding, Variants, and Herd Immunity
• A Review of the Use of N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) in Clinical Practice
• Covid-19 Insights: Talking to Your Patients About Covid-19 Vaccines and Vaccine Interactions
• Thyroid Nodule Reduction with Spirulina, Curcumin, and Boswellia? Maybe.
• Medication-Induced Osteoporosis
• Stress, Immunity, and Hair Health
• Covid-19 Insights: An Integrative Approach to Post Acute Covid-19 Syndrome
• Floatation Therapy for Specific Health Concerns

We are especially grateful to our contributors for continuing to share their knowledge during these challenging times, and to our readers for their continued support. If you'd like to write for Natural Medicine Journal in the new year, drop us a note to learn more about joining our esteemed team of contributors! 

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Deirdre Shevlin Bell directs content for Natural Medicine Journal . She is a content strategist and copywriter whose company DSB Communications  helps natural health and sustainability organizations tell their stories.

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Nature’s 10

Ten people who helped shape science in 2021

15 DECEMBER 2021

Credit: Elena Galofaro Bansh

An Omicron investigator, a Mars explorer and an AI ethics pioneer are some of the people behind the year’s big research stories.

The Nature’s 10 list explores key developments in science this year and some of the people who played important parts in these milestones. Along with their colleagues, these individuals helped to make amazing discoveries and brought attention to crucial issues. Nature’s 10 is not an award or a ranking. The selection is compiled by Nature’s editors to highlight key events in science through the compelling stories of those involved.

Credit: Erich Bartlebaugh/BuzzFeed New​s/eyevine

Winnie Byanyima: Vaccine warrior

This UN leader knew that vaccine equity wouldn’t happen without a fight.

By Amy Maxmen

Before vaccines for COVID-19 even existed, Winnie Byanyima knew that distributing them equitably would be a challenge. In early 2020, she was one of the few voices warning that low- and middle-income countries could not rely on donations alone to vaccinate their people. The only way to get life-saving shots to everyone, she argued, would be by helping as many companies as possible to manufacture them and by setting up systems of distribution to get them where they’re needed.

That hasn’t happened. Companies that developed coronavirus vaccines, such as Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna, have held on tightly to the intellectual-property (IP) rights, and wealthy countries have snapped up most doses. Several nations are now distributing booster shots, whereas only about 6% of people in low-income countries have received a single dose. Byanyima expected this disparity because of her experience with the AIDS epidemic. In the early 2000s, life-saving drugs existed but were largely unavailable in her home country of Uganda.

She finds the profit models for some drugs and vaccines infuriating. “This idea that you can sell a life-saving health technology the way you sell a luxury handbag is not normal,” says Byanyima, who leads UNAIDS, the United Nations agency heading the effort to end AIDS around the world. “We shouldn’t normalize it, we shouldn’t respect it and we should call it what it is: immoral, greedy and wrong.” Byanyima co-founded the advocacy group the People’s Vaccine Alliance to change that way of thinking. Its strategy has been to enlist powerful leaders by presenting them with carefully tailored arguments that highlight how supporting vaccine equity will further their own goals. “Governments are not saints, but they respond to people’s demands.”

This May, Byanyima and her colleagues celebrated an unexpected victory when the United States — historically a strident patent defender — threw its weight behind a proposal from South Africa and India to waive the IP protections surrounding COVID-19 vaccines in the hope of bolstering manufacturing capacity.

There is still much work to be done. Several countries and the European Union remain opposed to such a waiver, and the companies that own the IP have rejected requests to license their vaccine technologies and share the knowledge needed to produce them. The corporations defend their actions by saying that waivers would not change the situation and would undermine innovation.

Byanyima disagrees, and her frank statements on this and other matters of inequity have won her many admirers. “Some people will say inequality is bad,” says John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. “But when Winnie talks about it, you feel there is a fire in her that comes from within.”

Byanyima says it was this thirst for justice that caused her to leave her career in aeronautical engineering soon after the overthrow of Uganda’s former authoritarian president Idi Amin. In 1981, she joined a guerilla movement fighting to restore democracy and human rights to Uganda. They prevailed, and by 1994, she was elected to Uganda’s parliament. She was appointed head of UNAIDS in 2019, where she is putting equity at the centre of the programme’s work around the world. Global-health-policy researcher Matthew Kavanagh took leave from a position at Georgetown University in Washington DC, to work for Byanyima because of the way she targets underlying inequalities that foster the spread of HIV. The same goes for COVID-19: “Winnie drove the conversation on vaccine equity, starting way before vaccines existed, and others have raced to catch up,” Kavanagh says.

Byanyima is working to ensure that the fruits of science change lives. “Without political decisions to reduce inequality,” she says, “we can’t get anywhere.”

Credit: Joakim Stahl/SvD/TT/Alamy

Friederike Otto: Weather detective

As heatwaves, floods and droughts multiply, this researcher assesses whether humans bear some blame.

By Quirin Schiermeier

Friederike Otto has spent the past seven years studying extreme weather events, but even she was shocked when an extraordinary heatwave hit Canada and the US Pacific Northwest in July, shattering temperature records and killing hundreds of people.

Whenever extreme weather strikes these days, people immediately wonder whether climate change is to blame. This is exactly the kind of question that Otto and her collaborators in the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group try to answer quickly . Otto set up a video call with the WWA team and they planned a speedy research study. The team pored over meteorological data to gauge how big the heatwave was, studied climate records for the region and ran computer models to find out how much more likely this kind of heatwave has become, relative to a hypothetical world without climate change. The result: it would have been all but impossible for a heatwave of that magnitude to have happened in the region without human-induced climate change.

“Temperature records were broken by 5 °C in some places,” Otto says. “That’s immense.”

Otto, a climate researcher at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London, helped to set up the WWA in 2015 with the aim of rapidly analysing whether climate change plays a part in extreme heat, cold, downpours, drought and wildfire activity. She chairs the ad hoc group, which includes about a dozen climate modellers and statisticians.

Aside from the American Northwest heatwave this year, she and the group analysed the role of climate change in the devastating floods in July in Germany and Belgium, an April ‘cold wave’ in France, and the persistent drought in Madagascar.

Otto earnt her PhD in the philosophy of science before turning to physics, and eventually to climate science. Like many researchers, she is sincerely worried about the impacts of climate change. “I’m into justice,” she says. “And climate change is one of the biggest threats to justice.”

Until a few years ago, scientists would have been hard pressed to answer with certainty whether climate change is to blame for specific extremes, and how much more (or less) likely they have become. Many scientists viewed attribution studies critically when the WWA made its first attempts to analyse extreme events — using just one or two climate models without evaluating whether these were able to reliably simulate the extreme in question.

This has changed entirely. Otto and her team — including her former co-chair, the Dutch climate modeller Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, who died this year after a long illness — have developed a strategy that uses climate simulations from as many as 50 models. This approach and the studies generated are now widely viewed as highly robust; they feature prominently in a report issued in August by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific committee established by the United Nations. It is now an “established fact”, the panel said, that rising greenhouse-gas emissions have made some weather extremes — in particular, extreme heat — more frequent and more intense . Its report came out shortly before the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the global climate-change treaty , held last month in Glasgow, UK.

Attribution studies are more difficult in the global south, where reliable climate data are often lacking , and where local research capacities are limited. But these are some of the places most at risk from climate change and the extreme weather that it can spark. Otto hopes that lower-income countries will be able to strengthen their research in these areas in coming years, with support from wealthier countries.

“Attribution studies are really essential in terms of understanding human impacts of climate change,” says Emily Boyd, a social scientist at Lund University in Sweden who studies climate adaptation and governance. “The science is shifting our mindsets — it allows us to think about the relation between climate and vulnerability in a completely new way.”

Together with Boyd and legal scholars, Otto will study how vulnerable groups and countries might be able to capitalize on attribution studies. “The science”, says Boyd, “has every potential to drive government action and promote climate justice.”

Credit: Sun Zifa/CNSphoto

Zhang Rongqiao: Mars explorer

This engineer leads China’s first successful Mars mission, which reached the planet this year and landed a rover on its surface.

By Smriti Mallapaty

On 15 May, Zhang Rongqiao wiped tears from his eyes as China’s Mars rover landed safely on the planet’s sandy, auburn plains . “I was so overwhelmed,” says Zhang, who coordinated the mission.

The touchdown marked the conclusion of a 475-million-kilometre journey full of peril for Zhang and the China National Space Administration, which had never before sent a successful mission to Mars.

The landing, says Zhang, gave him a taste of the old Chinese saying — it takes ten years to sharpen a good sword. China is only the second nation, after the United States, to place a rover on Mars, which is notorious for crushing the hopes of space agencies; nearly half of all missions to the planet have ended in failure.

China’s team faced many unknowns in what Zhang calls “such a strange and complex environment”. As chief designer, he is responsible for coordinating a team of tens of thousands who built and operate the Mars mission, named Tianwen-1. The project consists of an orbiter, a lander and the rover, called Zhurong. “The buck stops with him,” says David Flannery, an astrobiologist at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

The mission was one of three to arrive at Mars in 2021 — the others were NASA’s Perseverance rover and an orbiter delivered by the United Arab Emirates . The success of China’s mission has made a national hero of Zhang, who has appeared numerous times on state media, but rarely talks to the press outside China. He responded to Nature ’s questions by e-mail.

Science took a back seat to Tianwen-1’s primary goal, which was to develop and demonstrate China’s prowess in deep-space missions that travel beyond the Moon. But Zhang says that getting rich and high-quality information from Mars was a key consideration of the design. And researchers say that the data generated by the rover’s six scientific instruments, and another seven on the orbiter, will contribute to a better understanding of a previously unexplored patch of the planet.

Born in 1966 in the town of Anling, eastern China, Zhang studied engineering at Xidian University in Xi’an. He later completed a master’s degree at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology in Beijing, and has worked on Earth-observation satellites.

Lu Pan, a planetary scientist at the University of Copenhagen, says that Zhang probably played a key part in the CNSA’s decision to send an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars in one shipment — making China the first country to do so. Researchers also say that Zhang considered their input on the choice of instruments and landing site, which will help to ensure that the mission generates as much research as possible.

“He encouraged scientists to participate in the mission to get more scientific output,” says Wenzhe Fa, a planetary scientist at Peking University, Beijing, who is analysing radar data from the Mars mission.

Launched on 23 July 2020, Tianwen-1 arrived at the red planet in February, and dropped the lander and rover in May. The spacecraft settled on a vast impact crater named Utopia Planitia — selected mainly because it is flat and a relatively safe place to land. Since then, the rover has travelled more than 1,200 metres south, taking panoramic images as well as selfies that have been widely shared online.

In mid-September, Zhurong went into hibernation because the Sun got in the way of communications between Mars and the Earth, but it returned to work in late October. It is now heading towards a region that might once have been the coastline of an ancient ocean, where researchers will search for clues about the evolution of Mars.

The mission has produced limited science so far, but data collected by some instruments on the rover and orbiter have been shared with more than two dozen teams across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, says Fa, and results are seeping out. They expect to learn insights about the geology of the Utopia Planitia region and the fate of water on the planet.

For China’s deep-space missions to take a big leap scientifically, the country will need to refocus towards advancing research rather than chiefly demonstrating engineering. That switch has already happened with China’s lunar missions, says Pan. “These processes take time.”

The real research riches for China, says Flannery, will come later — with the next round of planetary missions. China plans to launch sample-return missions to the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa in 2024, and to Mars before 2030. And it has its sights set on Jupiter, too.

Tianwen-1 has also given China’s nascent field of planetary science a boost, say researchers.

“A new generation of scientists is being created right now with this mission,” says Flannery.

Credit: Djeneba Aduayom

Timnit Gebru: AI ethics leader

After losing her job at Google, an artificial-intelligence pioneer founded an independent institute to raise questions about ethics in technology.

By Holly Else

Timnit Gebru, a researcher who studies the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), says her past year has been — in a word — horrible. Last December, she lost her job at Google after a row over the tech giant’s vetting of her work. The highly publicized ousting shocked scientists, including some in the firm, and thousands of researchers rallied to support her, amplifying her concerns around anti-Black discrimination in AI, and around the harms that the technology can cause to marginalized groups in society.

Now, Gebru has forged her own path. On 2 December this year, exactly 12 months after her split with Google, she launched a research institute to study AI independently of big tech companies. The events of the past year, she says, reflect a growing realization that the faults of AI should not be framed as technical problems: they are a symptom of the flawed environment in which the technology is developed.

Born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, Gebru fled the region during a time of war as a teenager and eventually arrived in the United States as a refugee. During her PhD at Stanford University in California, she co-founded a ‘Black in AI’ group with computer scientist Rediet Abebe. And while working at Microsoft, she and computer scientist Joy Buolamwini reported that facial-recognition software performed less well at identifying the gender of people who were not white men — a finding that drew more attention to bias in AI.

Gebru joined Google in 2018, where she co-led the firm’s ethical AI team with Margaret Mitchell. The pair had a reputation for creating a supportive environment for Black and brown researchers at the firm, where 1.6% of researchers (now 1.8%) were Black women. Their team studied the potential harms of AI, helped Google product teams to think through societal risks of their technologies and supported workforce diversity and inclusion.

But in late 2020, a dispute flared about a paper Gebru had authored with Mitchell and external academics. It critiqued the environmental impacts and potential biases of large language models — AI software that generates fluent prose and that Google uses in search engines. Gebru was told that internal reviewers at the firm wanted her to withdraw the paper from a conference that she’d submitted it to, or to remove Google-affiliated authors; when she asked for details about who had suggested this — and e-mailed colleagues saying that Google was silencing marginalized voices — she found herself without a job. Google says it accepted her resignation; Gebru says that she was fired, as she had only threatened to resign. (Google didn’t respond to Nature ’s request for comment for this article.)

Gebru tweeted about the split, and the company faced a storm of protest. Almost 7,000 researchers and engineers, including more than 2,600 from Google, signed a petition in December 2020 calling for an overhaul of the company’s research integrity. In February, the firm fired Gebru’s colleague Mitchell after she searched for incidents of discrimination against Gebru in her company e-mail. Two other Google employees left the company outraged at Gebru’s treatment, and several groups that support minority researchers in AI ended sponsorship agreements with Google.

Gebru says that what happened to her was a display of disrespect to her and her work that amounts to misogynoir — anti-Black sexism. “They would never do what they did to me to someone else,” she says. “Google had a problem with me speaking up about discrimination.”

Meredith Whittaker, who researches the social implications of AI at New York University, says that it suddenly became clear to those on the outside that Google’s commitment to ethics “was only paper thin”.

Reverberations from the firing were powerful because Gebru has such a high-profile voice, says Luke Stark, a researcher who studies the social impacts of AI at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “It was immediately obvious that this was censorship,” he says. The firing also brought into focus AI research’s dependency on corporate money, and how academics have become so entangled in it, Whittaker adds.

Gebru says that she has long had ideas about creating her own institute to build a positive model of how AI work should be done. Those dreams came to fruition after she applied for grants and won US$3.7 million in funding from several philanthropic organizations. The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute — a remote interdisciplinary centre — will develop AI models and applications that do not depend on the large data sets and computing power that the big tech companies hold.

The organization has two advisory board members and two research fellows (including Gebru), and expects to hire more people soon. “Her institute is not going to shy away from the reality of things,” says Deborah Raji, who has collaborated with Gebru on AI ethics and works at the non-profit Internet foundation Mozilla. “It’s going to be a great landing spot for people who want to ask these questions and don’t have somewhere to do it. She’s going to define the field in ways people don’t appreciate. It is going to be amazing.”

Credit: Rogan Ward for Nature

Tulio de Oliveira: Variant tracker

A bioinformatician in South Africa helped to identify troubling variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

By Linda Nordling

On 25 November, Tulio de Oliveira announced the discovery of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 . Omicron, detected in samples from Botswana, South Africa and Hong Kong, had a Swiss Army knife of mutations that de Oliveira and other leading scientists feared might help it to evade immunity from previous infection or vaccinations.

For de Oliveira, director of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform (KRISP), it was eerily reminiscent of the previous year, when his team had discovered another SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in South African samples. Beta, as that variant became known, led foreign governments to curb travel to and from South Africa many months after its discovery. Both variants were spotted after doctors and laboratory workers flagged unexpected rises in infections in areas that had already been hit hard by COVID-19.

De Oliveira knew that by reporting yet another concerning variant, he ran the risk of incurring fresh sanctions, which would economically penalize countries in southern Africa. But he also knew it was the right thing to do. “The way that one stops a pandemic is by quick action,” says the Brazilian-born bioinformatician. “Wait and see has not been a good option.”

The rapid identification of both Beta and Omicron in southern Africa reinforces the importance of having disease surveillance spread evenly around the world, says Jeremy Farrar, director of the biomedical research charity Wellcome, based in London. “If an imbalance continues, then where disease surveillance is limited, we risk new variants of COVID-19 — or even new diseases entirely — cropping up and spreading unchecked,” he says.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the first time that genomic sequencing has been used to trace outbreaks in Africa; scientists used it in the Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2014 to 2016. KRISP, created in 2017 with de Oliveira at the helm, has tracked pathogens behind diseases including dengue and Zika, and more common scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis. But never before have so many different samples of the same virus been sequenced in such a short period of time — both in Africa and around the world.

De Oliveira’s work has also influenced policymaking. KRISP’s way of working combines cutting-edge molecular technology with close links to doctors and nurses on the front line, to inform policy in real time. For example, their mapping of an early hospital outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in guidelines for ward layouts to prevent the virus from spreading in hospitals. “Tulio has done an incredible job pioneering a new way of science responding to epidemics,” says Christian Happi, a molecular biologist who heads the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases at Redeemer’s University in Ede, Nigeria.

In December, de Oliveira moved permanently to Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town, South Africa, where he has been setting up the Centre for Epidemic Research, Response and Innovation (CERI) since July (he will keep his position at KRISP). The centre will work to control epidemics in Africa and the global south, and will house Africa’s largest sequencing facility. The coronavirus pandemic has fuelled these investments, but the momentum is already spilling over into surveillance on other diseases, says de Oliveira. “The main thing we have shown the world is that these things can be done in developing countries.”

Not that those countries have been rewarded for it — quite the opposite. De Oliveira says he was extremely disappointed when rich countries imposed travel bans on southern Africa simply because the country had the scientific skill to discover new variants. The scapegoating of South Africa “was almost a smokescreen for the vaccine hoarding, and for rich countries losing control of the pandemic”, says de Oliveira. “Of course I expected more.”

De Oliveira’s role in announcing two variants of concern has given him a reputation for delivering bad news. When the Omicron announcement brought fresh travel bans, some South Africans, including politicians, queried de Oliveira’s right to make such pronouncements. Some people even view the genomic-surveillance community as the enemy. But, he says: “We are not the enemies, we are the opposite.”

Credit: Alecsandra Dragoi for Nature

John Jumper: Protein predictor

A team led by this AI researcher released a tool that is transforming biology.

By Ewen Callaway

What would it mean if determining the structure of almost any protein — all of its intricate folds, pockets and catalytic surfaces — were as simple as performing a web search? John Jumper and his colleagues at DeepMind in London attempted to answer that question earlier this year with the public release of AlphaFold, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict protein structures with stunning accuracy.

“It is going to change the face of modern biology,” says Tobin Sosnick, a biophysicist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and one of Jumper’s former PhD advisers. “There’s going to be a before and after 2021, when people ask, ‘What is structural biology?’”

AlphaFold’s development was a process of destruction and rebirth. In 2018, the team working on it jolted the small community of scientists interested in protein-structure prediction. At a biennial competition called CASP (short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction), an early version of AlphaFold outperformed all other computational tools for determining a protein’s shape from its sequence .

But despite the win, AlphaFold didn’t generate predictions with fine enough detail, says Jumper, who was co-leader of the team at the time. Efforts to improve its performance hit a wall. So the researchers decided to start from scratch. “You had to throw away everything,” says Pushmeet Kohli, head of AI for Science at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Jumper had a key role in the decision to start afresh, says Kohli, and stuck with it, even when early versions of ‘AlphaFold2’ performed much worse than its predecessor. “He’s not afraid of taking on new directions.”

Jumper has a history of changing tack. He started a PhD in condensed-matter physics at the University of Cambridge, UK, but decided it wasn’t the right research topic. So he left with a master’s degree and wound up working on computer simulations of proteins at a private research group run by a physicist-turned-hedge-fund-manager. “I didn’t know what a protein was when I showed up,” says Jumper.

He next embarked on a chemistry PhD programme, in which he used machine learning to study protein dynamics. Applying AI to a scientific problem was “really magical”, says Jumper. But he wanted stability. So, he applied for jobs in finance as well as at commercial AI laboratories. During an interview with DeepMind, the company revealed its plans to tackle protein-structure prediction, and Jumper was intrigued. “I probably would have left science, if not for DeepMind,” Jumper notes.

The first iteration of AlphaFold was based on a neural network that predicted the distance between parts of a target protein, an approach that other teams were also taking. Jumper wanted AlphaFold to deliver predictions that scientists could have confidence in, necessitating a complete overhaul of the underlying neural network.

The second version of AlphaFold dominated CASP again in late 2020 , this time by an even wider margin. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of its predictions were on a par with experimentally determined structures. For Jumper, however, the most rewarding chapter in AlphaFold’s story came in July. He and his team released the network’s underlying code, as well as predicted structures for almost all proteins in human s and 20 other model organisms — 250,000 structures in total — together with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK. They plan to release the structures of nearly half of all known proteins — totalling 130 million structures — next year.

Jumper’s team regularly hears from other researchers who now use AlphaFold. One of the projects he was most excited about was a map of the nuclear pore complex, a gargantuan molecular machine that is a gatekeeper to the genomes of eukaryotic cells. The work combined AlphaFold’s structures and other predictions with experimental structures comprising the complex, which consists of more than 1,000 individual protein chains.

For Jumper, such applications are the highest compliment. “To see the amount to which AlphaFold has changed the work of experimentalists has been really, really incredible,” he says. “The dream is to do something really useful.”

Credit: ​Annie Ling/The New York Times/ Redux/eyevine

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz: Indigenous defender

A former revolutionary helped Indigenous peoples to gain international recognition for protecting biodiversity and the climate.

By Jeff Tollefson

As the United Nations climate summit COP26 kicked off in Glasgow, UK, several wealthy nations and more than a dozen philanthropic organizations stepped up with an unprecedented commitment. They pledged to provide US$1.7 billion to help Indigenous peoples around the world to preserve forests, protect biodiversity and prevent global warming by keeping carbon locked up in plants and soils.

It was a watershed moment for Indigenous groups, and much of the credit goes to decades of work by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an Indigenous leader from the Philippines who served for six years as the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Tauli-Corpuz has spent years criss-crossing the globe to convince governments, environmentalists and philanthropic foundations that Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of forests and other hotspots of biodiversity — something that has recently been backed up by scientific literature.

“The world caught up with her, and also science caught up with her,” says David Kaimowitz, an economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN in Rome. Kaimowitz says that it has really only been in the past five or ten years that peer-reviewed literature has provided data showing that Indigenous lands serve as protective buffers against environmentally harmful activities such as mining, dams and deforestation (see A. Blackman et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 114 , 4123–4128; 2017 ). Having grown up in an Igorot village without electricity in the mountains of the Philippines, Tauli-Corpuz learnt that lesson earlier than most. When the regime of former president Ferdinand Marcos sought to log her people’s forests and install a hydroelectric dam in their river in the 1970s, she joined the opposition.

“We defeated the dam, and the logging stopped,” says Tauli-Corpuz, who is the founder and executive director of the Tebtebba Foundation in Baguio City, the Philippines.

She realized that the fates of Indigenous peoples and the world’s forests are inextricably intertwined. As she worked her way through the UN bureaucracy over the course of 35 years, Tauli-Corpuz became a forceful critic of what she calls “fortress conservation” — a model that presumes that nature can be preserved only if walled off from humanity. “The conservation mindset has to be changed,” she says, because the forests that hold much of Earth’s biodiversity and carbon are also home to the world’s Indigenous populations. “People live in these forests, and we should be working with them.” In recent years, with the help of satellite imagery, scientists have come to the same conclusion. Like national parks and other protected areas, Indigenous territories are less prone to deforestation, mining and dams than neighbouring lands.

That idea gained traction this year. Indigenous rights were recognized during the virtual UN Convention on Biological Diversity in October, and received unprecedented attention at the world conservation congress in Marseilles, France, in September. Indigenous groups attended the latter as members for the first time and successfully pushed for a motion that called on governments to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025. And for the first time, governments and donors stepped up at COP26 with real funding commitments.

Activism came naturally for Tauli-Corpuz. In 1966, she earned a spot in an elite high school in Manila, and joined protests against her country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. She was at university when the Marcos regime declared martial law in 1972, and studied to be a nurse in preparation for potentially violent uprisings. After university, she returned home to help organize community health programmes, while also promoting resistance against the regime and the proposed dam and logging — activities that resulted in a military raid on her home in 1980.

In 1985, Tauli-Corpuz received an invitation to join a UN panel in Geneva, Switzerland, investigating Indigenous rights. It took nearly a quarter of a century and plenty of travel, but Tauli-Corpuz saw the effort through. In September 2007, the UN General Assembly in New York City adopted a landmark declaration that recognized, for the first time, the collective rights of Indigenous peoples. Tauli-Corpuz then carried that effort forwards under the UN climate convention, ultimately helping to garner recognition of Indigenous rights in the 2015 Paris agreement. At the COP26 summit, Indigenous rights were once again recognized in an agreement governing international partnerships and carbon markets.

“The attention on Indigenous peoples was unprecedented,” says Jennifer Corpuz, one of Tauli-Corpuz’s four children, who has followed in her mother’s footsteps in the Indigenous-rights movement. An attorney with the US-based non-profit advocacy group Nia Tero, Corpuz acknowledges that she sometimes suffers from the weight of expectation, but says she never felt any pressure from her mother.

From 2014 to 2020, as the UN special rapporteur, Tauli-Corpuz travelled the world, holding meetings with Indigenous communities to talk about the challenges they are facing on the ground. In one influential 2016 report to the UN, she shone a light on how the creation and enforcement of conventional protected areas such as national parks and nature reserves has often impinged on the rights and land claims of Indigenous communities.

Now back at her foundation, Tauli-Corpuz continues to work with Indigenous communities around the world, helping them to understand their rights and gain the title to their traditional lands. She is also helping Indigenous communities to bolster their own governance systems, which will be crucial as they seek to propose projects and access the newly committed international funds.

“It’s really about helping the Indigenous peoples empower themselves,” she says. “Hopefully, we can strengthen their capacity to do what they need to do.”

Credit: Frédéric Scheiber for Nature

Guillaume Cabanac: Deception sleuth

This computer scientist helped to uncover a new kind of fabricated paper.

By Diana Kwon

Underground creepy crawly state. Bosom malignancy. Sun oriented force. These might sound like expressions from a work of fiction, but they are actually strange translations, pulled from the scholarly literature, of scientific terms — ant colony, breast cancer and solar energy, respectively. Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, spots such bizarre phrases in academic papers every day.

This year, Cabanac and his colleagues found these tortured phrases, as they call them, in thousands of papers . A handful have been retracted; publishers are investigating many more. Cabanac has built a website to keep track of the mushrooming problem. “They found this whole new hornet’s nest of articles that appear to be completely fake,” says Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity analyst in California.

Weeding out these problems is related to Cabanac’s day job: he specializes in analysing the scholarly literature, and now devotes around two hours a day to finding tortured phrases. Some people might find them funny, but Cabanac takes the problem seriously. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he says.

Cabanac’s hunt for gibberish papers began in 2015, when he started collaborating with Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. Labbé had developed a program to spot gibberish computer-science papers automatically generated using SCIgen, a piece of software created initially as a joke. Labbé’s work led journals to withdraw more than 120 manuscripts . Cabanac helped to update Labbé’s program to find papers only partially written by SCIgen, and to locate them using Dimensions, a search engine for scholarly literature. This year, they reported finding hundreds more papers containing nonsense text , published in journals and conference proceedings and as preprints.

To raise awareness, Cabanac and his colleagues e-mailed publishers and posted their findings on social media and on PubPeer, a post-publication peer-review site. Cabanac also created the Problematic Paper Screener , a website for flagging and reporting questionable manuscripts. “He gets frustrated about fake papers,” Labbé says. “He’s really willing to do whatever it takes to prevent these things from happening.”

The SCIgen work led Alexander Magazinov, a software engineer at the multinational technology firm Yandex, headquartered in Moscow, to contact Labbé and Cabanac. Magazinov asked whether SCIgen might be behind oddly paraphrased versions of scientific concepts he’d noticed in papers, such as “colossal information” for “big data”. Together, the three located the terms in hundreds of papers , which they reported in July. Digging deeper, they suggested that machine-paraphrasing tools might have been used to create them.

“I think these tortured phrases indicate a failure of peer review,” says Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, with whom Cabanac has worked on other scientific-integrity projects. “Surely, somebody who was conscious during the peer-review process would have seen that that’s not really right.”

By now, Cabanac and colleagues — along with volunteers from the PubPeer community — have pinpointed nearly 400 tortured phrases in more than 2,000 papers, including ones in journals from well-known publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature ( Nature ’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher). Each such phrase first has to be spotted by a person; a search algorithm then runs on Dimensions’ index to find papers that include it. Cabanac and a host of helpers manually scan each of these articles to weed out false positives. Eventually, Cabanac would like to develop a program that can identify tortured phrases automatically.

Cabanac hopes that his work will help to decontaminate the scientific literature. But he knows that will not be easy. “I’m afraid of new techniques that would help scammers publish papers containing errors that would be less detectable,” he says. “It’s a whack-a-mole game. We need to be prepared.”

Credit: Jessica Hallett/ Nature

Meaghan Kall: COVID communicator

A government epidemiologist went against norms to tweet explanations of UK coronavirus data.

By Richard Van Noorden

On the afternoon of 8 January, Meaghan Kall, a UK government epidemiologist, helped to put the finishing touches to a technical briefing document about a concerning SARS-CoV-2 variant spreading in southeast England. Then, about half an hour after the report was published, she tried something new: she posted a Twitter thread breaking down its key points.

Kall had seen increasing disquiet and confusion about the coronavirus variants online, and wanted to explain publicly what the government data showed. She hadn’t asked permission from her bosses at Public Health England (PHE) — an agency tasked with responding to health threats, now succeeded by the UK Health Security Agency. “I just did it,” she says. But she soon got an audience. UK researchers chimed in with questions; so did a US philosopher and an Argentinian programmer.

It was the first of a series of accessible, rapid explainers from Kall on dozens of the agency’s coronavirus briefings. Through her tweets — prepared and posted around her day job — she became a human face for a government team that has provided many early answers to burning questions about COVID-19 in 2021.

Thanks to its early roll-out of vaccines, well-equipped genomics laboratories and unified National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom was quick to produce high-quality data on the coronavirus, from the spread of new variants to the effectiveness of vaccines. “PHE’s data have been absolutely invaluable and have been used by the whole world to understand many key aspects of COVID-19,” says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

UK researchers did a better job communicating these data than other countries with early vaccine roll-outs. Scientists from Israel, for instance, often shared initial data on social media only as pictures, making it hard to extract data, and in Hebrew, making the results difficult for an international audience to understand, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.

With so much misinformation and confusion about what data such as these can mean, public-health agencies struggled to get their messages across. Kall stepped into this breach. “Meaghan has been a wonderful source of hot-off-the-presses information and has done a fantastic job in breaking down the reports,” says Kilpatrick.

Dozens of scientists have emerged as communication stars on Twitter during the pandemic, but Kall’s position is unusual. “As a civil servant, I have limited scope to speak my truth,” she tweeted in September. In more than 6,000 tweets this year, she also shared photos of her rapid coronavirus tests when her family had to isolate, and invited people who were worried about COVID-19 vaccines to message her privately. Her tweeting was neither forbidden nor encouraged by her bosses, she says, although some colleagues have been personally supportive.

Kall thinks her public communication has aided trust in UK government data. “My favourite responses are the people who say, ‘I didn’t really have a lot of faith in PHE, I didn’t really trust it, until I started following your Twitter feed,’” she says.

Before COVID-19, Kall spent a decade monitoring HIV infections for UK government agencies. She says that her work with people with HIV — she was writing up her PhD on a national survey of those living with the virus when COVID-19 struck — gave her experience in understanding people’s sometimes opposing views, as did her upbringing in a small, conservative town in Michigan.

Kall’s most popular tweets have criticized the UK coronavirus response, which included the controversial privatization of most of its testing and contact tracing. In November, she wrote: “I still think it was a huge oversight that our NHS sexual-health advisers, who are professional contact tracers, were never drafted in or consulted on Test and Trace.” Asked — with a press officer watching — about how much freedom she has to tweet, she says that she’s never been told what to say or been reprimanded, but she carefully chooses the issues that she feels strongly about.

Kall says putting together her Twitter threads cuts into her personal life — it takes her an hour or so to prepare each briefing breakdown, in addition to responding to questions — and colleagues ask her how she keeps going. “One of my main aims”, she says, “is really just to try and make sure people are empowered, and have agency to understand the data to make their own decisions, from a reliable source.”

Credit: Stefa​ni Reynolds/The New York Times​/eyevine

Janet Woodcock: Drug chief

This career administrator led the US’s premier drug agency through a challenging year.

By Heidi Ledford

Only days after Joe Biden became US president this January, he appointed Janet Woodcock as acting commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Soon, the letters came flooding in. Some were in her favour: one signed by 82 rare-disease patient-advocacy organizations praised her leadership and her focus on integrating patient voices in drug-approval decisions.

Others were less laudatory: 31 advocacy organizations urged the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services to keep Woodcock’s time at the helm of the FDA brief. “Dr Woodcock presided over one of the worst regulatory agency failures in US history,” they wrote, laying partial responsibility for the country’s raging opioid crisis at her feet. The debates over her would continue through a tumultuous year at the top of the agency.

Woodcock, a former medical doctor, spent most of her 35-year career at the FDA running the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which is responsible for ensuring that drugs are safe and effective before they are approved for the US market. Woodcock helped to modernize the centre’s drug-evaluation process, ushering in advanced clinical-trial designs and pathways to drug approval that are coupled with sophisticated diagnostic tests. She also oversaw the development of a bigger role for patients and their advocates in the approval process. In January, there was speculation that President Biden might nominate her to stay on as commissioner.

By June, however, that prospect dimmed after a controversial FDA decision to approve the drug aducanumab for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease . The drug, developed by Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had been shown to reduce tangled amyloid-β proteins in the brains of people with the disease. But it did not seem to improve cognitive function or symptoms.

A panel of external advisers to the FDA voted against the approval, but the agency made the unusual decision to ignore the recommendation. Michael Carome, director of health research at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington DC, says it was a pivotal moment: the agency had approved a drug that could be taken by millions, without solid evidence that it helps people. “It was one of the worst decisions the agency has ever made,” says Carome.

Woodcock declined to comment for this article, but an FDA spokesperson said that she was not involved in the aducanumab approval. Even so, as acting head of the agency, she bore some responsibility, says Aaron Kesselheim, a physician who also studies drug regulation at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Kesselheim served on the FDA advisory panel and, along with two others, resigned in protest over the decision. Woodcock has long advocated a close relationship between industry and the FDA, raising concerns among some consumer groups and academic scientists.

Kesselheim quit to call attention to what he worried might be an emerging trend at the agency: “My hope is that this kind of bad decision-making doesn’t metastasize.”

The agency faced more controversy in the summer, when the White House announced that the country would soon administer booster vaccines for COVID-19. The FDA had not yet issued a decision on the boosters, and Biden’s announcement was seen as not only premature, but also antithetical to his promise to put science and evidence at the centre of decision-making. Woodcock, along with several other US public-health officials, endorsed the plan but said that it was subject to regulatory approval.

The episode caused a disturbance at the FDA, and two key vaccine evaluators resigned in protest.

In November, Biden nominated cardiologist Robert Califf, a former FDA commissioner, to return to lead the agency . But Woodcock’s legacy will go beyond her year at the FDA’s helm, says Kesselheim.

Despite his critiques, he says, “I think the FDA makes the right decision most of the time, and continues to serve as a gold standard for drug regulation around the world.” Woodcock, he adds, “deserves some recognition for the way the FDA has evolved with the times”.

Ones to watch in 2022

Chikwe ihekweazu.

WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence

This epidemiologist will direct the surveillance hub and gather data on the COVID-19 pandemic and other outbreaks.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

As project scientist for operations for the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope , this astrophysicist will help to orchestrate what discoveries are made.

Love Dalén

Swedish Museum of Natural History

This geneticist has sequenced the oldest DNA on record — 1.65 million years old, from a mammoth — and is now going after more genetic remains.

Xie Zhenhua

China’s special envoy for climate change

This politician will have a central role in ongoing talks to strengthen international efforts aimed at combating climate change .

Graziano Venanzoni

Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics

This physicist is co-spokesperson for the Muon g-2 experiment . The effort could produce strong evidence of discrepancies between experiments and the standard model of particle physics, hinting at new fundamental discoveries.

This article is also available as a pdf version .

The profile on Timnit Gebru incorrectly referred to Ethiopia’s 1998 conflict with Eritrea as a civil war.

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Mock drafts put many QBs in first round of 2024 NFL draft. Guess how often that's worked?

Dozens of mock drafts leading up to this week's NFL draft have suggested that five quarterbacks could be selected in the first round. Some even speculate as many as six QBs could be drafted Thursday night.

It's no wonder considering how important the position has become to a team's offense and often the team's success.

But just because a quarterback is drafted in the first 32 picks of the NFL draft doesn't guarantee that he will be a franchise quarterback. A simple analysis of drafts since 1999 found just two of every five first-round quarterbacks have been their team's long-term answer.

Mock draft tracker: 5 possible first-round picks for every team in the 2024 NFL draft

Searchable NFL 2024 draft order: Easy way to see every teams' picks from Rounds 1 to 7

How many QBs have been linked to teams in USA TODAY's 2024 mock drafts

In USA TODAY's mock drafts since January, our experts have predicted no fewer than four quarterbacks – possibly three in the first three picks – will be taken in this year's first round.

Unable to view our graphics? Click here to see them .

2021's QB class looks more like Zach Wilson than Trevor Lawrence

The last time five quarterbacks (three in the first three) were selected in the first round, Trevor Lawrence was the top pick. He's already led the Jacksonville Jaguars to the playoffs in 2022 and earned a Pro Bowl nod.

Zach Wilson and Trey Lance were selected second and third in the 2021 draft. Both already landed on USA TODAY's list of 50 biggest busts along with Justin Fields, now with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Mac Jones. Of all 10 quarterbacks taken in 2021, Jones (15th by New England) is the only other player to make a Pro Bowl, but he most likely will back up Lawrence this season in Jacksonville .

Pro Bowl selections as a measure of a quarterback's "success"

Pro Bowl selections offer a relatively consistent measure of players who have risen above their peers. During the past decade, about 10 quarterbacks – nearly a third of the league – have been named to the Pro Bowl annually.

USA TODAY compiled a list of the 74 quarterbacks taken in the first round of the NFL draft since 1999 and used Pro Bowls as an initial yardstick. Only 34 of those 74 quarterbacks, or 46%, have made one Pro Bowl. We also factored in longevity and playoff data from Pro Football Reference. 

How often NFL teams hit on 1st-round quarterback selections

What about the other nfl draft classes.

While 1983 remains the year of the quarterback , half of the quarterbacks selected that year are in the Hall of Fame, one earned two Pro Bowl honors but still two fell short. 

The class of 1999, which featured a top-three trio, is more representative of teams' successes, or lack there of, in drafting their franchise quarterback.

Of the three, Donovan McNabb, taken second by Philadelphia in 1999, earned the franchise quarterback moniker, while the top pick that year Tim Couch (Cleveland) and Akili Smith (Cincinnati) were both out of the NFL within five years. 

Of the other two quarterbacks picked in the first round, Daunte Culpepper (No. 11 by Minnesota) earned three Pro Bowl nominations while Cade McNown (No. 12 by Chicago) played 25 games over two seasons.

It's not just about the first-round picks

As many as 20 quarterbacks could be drafted , according to the NFL, between Thursday and Saturday, and maybe one of the league's next top quarterbacks will be found in later rounds.

The obvious example:  Tom Brady, the best player picked in the last 25 years , or possibly ever, waited six rounds until he received New England's fateful call in 2000. The only quarterback picked in the first round that year: Chad Pennington, 18th, by the Jets.

Perhaps 2012 might serve as a comparison to this year's class.

While Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III drew much of the attention at the top, three others have enjoyed longer, more productive careers: Ryan Tannehill, Russell Wilson and Kirk Cousins. Nick Foles, another 2012 pick, doesn't have an impressive career stat line, but, like Wilson, has a Super Bowl ring.

Quarterbacks in the 2024 draft

All signs and mock drafts point to the Chicago Bears taking 2022 Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams from Southern California with the first pick of the draft Thursday night.

The 2023 Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels from LSU could hear his name called second by the Washington Commanders. If not, the Patriots would likely select Daniels with the third pick should the Commanders take Drake Maye from North Carolina. J.J. McCarthy from Michigan has also been considered a top-five or -six pick.

Here are the 14 quarterbacks who were invited to attend the 2024 NFL scouting combine .

The 2024 mock drafts behind the tracker

Want to take closer look at the USA TODAY's mock drafts? Here are a few of the mock drafts developed by Nate Davis and Michael Middlehurst-Schwartz:

◾ Feb. 26: Can question-mark QB J.J. McCarthy crack top 15 picks? Read more

◾ March 12: Four QBs in top five as Vikings trade up after Kirk Cousins leaves. Read more

◾ April 3: Who will Bills land to replace Stefon Diggs at wide receiver? Read more

◾ April 15: J.J. McCarthy or Drake Maye for Patriots at No. 3? Read more

◾ April 22: Six QBs make first-round cut as trade possibilities remain Read more

View, manage, and install add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word

When you enable an add-in, it adds custom commands and new features to Microsoft 365 programs that help increase your productivity. Because add-ins can be used by attackers to do harm to your computer, you can use add-in security settings to help protect yourself.

Note:  This article only applies to Microsoft 365 applications running on Windows.

View installed add-ins

You can directly install add-ins from this page or select  More Add-ins  to explore.

In the Office Add-ins dialog, select  My Add-ins  tab.

Select an add-in you want to view the details for and right-click to select  Add-in details  option.

Click a heading below for more information .  

Add-in categories explained

Active Application Add-ins      Add-ins registered and currently running on your Microsoft 365 program.

Inactive Application Add-ins      These are present on your computer but not currently loaded. For example, XML schemas are active when the document that refers to them is open. Another example is the COM add-in: if a COM add-in is selected, the add-in is active. If the check box is cleared, the add-in is inactive.

Document Related Add-ins      Template files referred to by open documents.

Disabled Application Add-ins     These add-ins are automatically disabled because they are causing Microsoft 365 programs to crash.

Add-in      The title of the add-in.

Publisher      The software developer or organization responsible for creating the add-in.

Compatibility      Look here for any compatibility issues.

Location      This file path indicates where the add-in is installed on your computer.

Description This text explains the add-in function.

Note:  Microsoft Outlook has one add-in option in the Trust Center: Apply macro security settings to installed add-ins . InfoPath has no security settings for add-ins.

Permanently disable or remove an add-in

To disable or remove an add-in follow these steps:

Select  File > Get Add-ins . Alternatively, you can select  Home > Add-ins .

In the Office Add-ins dialog, select  My Add-ins  tab.

Select an add-in you want to remove and right click to select  Remove  option.

View or change add-in settings

You can see and change add-in settings in the Trust Center, descriptions of which are in the following section. Add-in security settings may have been determined by your organization so not all options may be available to change.

Select  File  >  Get Add-ins .

Select  More Add-ins > Manage My Add-ins.

Select  Trust Center  >  Trust Center Settings  >  Add-ins.

Check or uncheck the boxes you want.

Add-in settings explained

Require Application Add-ins to be signed by Trusted Publisher      Check this box to have the Trust Center check that the add-in uses a publisher's trusted signature. If the publisher's signature hasn’t been trusted, the Microsoft 365 program doesn’t load the add-in, and the Trust Bar displays a notification that the add-in has been disabled.

Disable notification for unsigned add-ins (code will remain disabled)      When you check the Require Application Extensions to be signed by Trusted Publisher box, this option is no longer grayed out. Add-ins signed by a trusted publisher are enabled, but unsigned add-ins are disabled.

Disable all Application Add-ins (may impair functionality)      Check this box if you don't trust any add-ins. All add-ins are disabled without any notification, and the other add-in boxes are grayed out.

Note:  This setting takes effect after you exit and restart your Microsoft 365 program.

While working with add-ins, you may need to learn more about digital signatures and certificates , which authenticate an add-in, and trusted publishers , the software developers who often create add-ins.

Manage and install add-ins

Use the following instruction to manage and install add-ins.

To install a new add-in:

You can directly install popular add-ins on the page or go to More Add-ins  to explore. 

Select the add-in and select  Add . Or browse by selecting  Store  tab in the Office add-in dialog to find other add-ins to install and select Add for that add-in.

To manage your add-ins:

Select  File > Get Add-ins and from the bottom, select More Add-ins.  Or select  Home  >  Add-ins > More add-ins.

In the Office dialog, select My Add-ins tab. If you are not able to see your add-ins, select  Refresh to reload your add-ins.

Select  Manage My Add-in  to manage and select  Upload to browse and add an add-in from your device.

How to cancel a purchased add-in

If you've subscribed to an add-in through the Microsoft 365 Store that you don't want to continue, you can cancel that subscription.

Open the Microsoft 365 application and go to the Home  tab of the ribbon.

Select  Add-ins  and then select  More Add-ins > My Add-ins tab   to view your existing add-ins.

Select the app you want to cancel and select  Manage My Add-ins .

Under the Payment and Billing section choose Cancel Subscription .

Select  OK and then Continue .

Once that's complete you should see a message that says "You have cancelled your app subscription" in the comments field of your apps list.

Why is my add-in crashing?

Some add-ins might not be compatible with your organization's IT department policies. If that is the case with add-ins recently installed on your Microsoft 365 program, Data Execution Prevention (DEP) will disable the add-in and the program might crash.

Learn more about DEP

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If you're looking for Help on linking notes in OneNote to a Word or PowerPoint document, see Take linked notes .

Excel Windows Add-ins

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5 facts about Hispanic Americans and health care

Hispanic Americans have long faced health care challenges in the United States, including lower health insurance coverage rates and less access to preventative care.

Language and cultural barriers, as well as higher levels of poverty, are among the social and economic factors contributing to disparate health outcomes for Hispanic Americans. These disparities were apparent during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic , when Hispanics were far more likely than White Americans to have died from the virus .

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to highlight Hispanic Americans’ attitudes about and experiences with health care. We surveyed U.S. adults from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, 2021, including 3,716 Hispanic adults (inclusive of those who identify as any race). A total of 14,497 U.S. adults completed the survey.

The survey was conducted on the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and included an oversample of Black and Hispanic adults from the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the survey  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

This study was informed by a group of advisers with expertise related to Black and Hispanic Americans’ attitudes and experiences in science, health, STEM education and other areas. Pew Research Center remains solely responsible for all aspects of the research, including any errors associated with its products and findings.

This analysis includes additional information from sources including KFF and the U.S. Census Bureau. Further information about these sources can be found through the links in the text.

Here are five key facts about Hispanic Americans and health care, based on a 2021 Pew Research Center survey of Hispanic adults and other sources:

Hispanic adults are less likely than other Americans to have seen a health care provider recently and to have a primary care provider. Seven-in-ten say they’ve seen a doctor or other health care provider in the past year, compared with 82% among Americans overall. Hispanics are also slightly less likely than Americans overall to say they have a primary care provider (68% vs. 76%).

Health care access among Hispanic immigrants differs markedly based on how long they have lived in the U.S. More recent arrivals are less likely than those who have been in the country longer to have seen a doctor recently and to have a primary care provider. For example, 48% of Hispanic immigrants who have been in the U.S. for a decade or less report having a primary care provider, compared with 79% among those who have been in the U.S. for more than two decades.

Recent arrivals make up a declining share of Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. And more broadly, immigrants account for a declining share of the overall U.S. Hispanic population . In 2021, they made up 32% of all Hispanic Americans, down from 37% in 2010.

Hispanic Americans are less likely than people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds to have health insurance. As of 2021, the uninsured rate among Hispanics under age 65 was 19%, according to KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation . That was higher than the share among Black (11%), White (7%) and Asian Americans (6%). (These figures include rates among children as well as adults.)

While comparatively high, the uninsured rate among Hispanic Americans under age 65 in 2021 was down from 33% in 2010, before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, according to KFF.

Lower rates of health insurance coverage play a major role in Hispanic Americans’ less frequent interactions with health care providers.

The relative youth of the U.S. Hispanic population may be another factor at play. The median age of Hispanic Americans was 30 as of 2020, compared with 41 for non-Hispanic Americans, according to the U.S. Census Bureau . Among both Hispanic and non-Hispanic Americans, younger people are less likely than their elders to have seen a health care provider recently and to have a primary care provider.

Many Hispanic Americans say worse health outcomes for Hispanics are tied to occupational and structural factors. Some 53% of Hispanic adults say a major reason why Hispanic people generally have worse health outcomes is that they’re more likely to work in jobs that put them at risk for health problems. About half (48%) say a major reason is that Hispanic people have less access to quality medical care where they live.

At least four-in-ten Hispanic adults also point to communication problems arising from language or cultural differences (44%) and preexisting health conditions (40%) as major reasons. (Majorities view all of these factors as at least minor reasons for disparate health outcomes among Hispanic adults.)

The coronavirus outbreak took an especially heavy toll on Hispanic Americans when compared with White Americans. Hispanics also face higher rates of certain diseases like diabetes than some other Americans.

When it comes to progress in health outcomes for Hispanic people, 51% of Hispanic adults say health outcomes have gotten a lot or a little better over the past two decades, compared with 13% who say they’ve gotten a lot or a little worse; 34% say they’ve stayed about the same.

About a third of Hispanic Americans – including 58% of Hispanic immigrants – say they prefer to see a Spanish-speaking health care provider. Overall, 35% of Hispanic adults strongly or somewhat prefer seeing a Spanish-speaking doctor or other health care provider for routine care. A larger share (51%) say it makes no difference whether the doctor they see speaks Spanish or not. And 13% say they would rather not see a Spanish-speaking doctor.

Attitudes are broadly similar when it comes to seeing a Hispanic doctor or health care provider. A third of Hispanic adults say they would prefer to see a Hispanic doctor for routine care, while 59% say it makes no difference and 7% would rather not.

Among Hispanic adults, immigrants are much more likely than those born in the U.S. to prefer seeing a Spanish-speaking doctor (58% vs. 12%) and to prefer seeing a Hispanic doctor (47% vs. 20%). About half of Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. mostly speak and read in Spanish.

Hispanic Americans account for 19% of the U.S. population . But only 9% of the nation’s health care practitioners and technicians are Hispanic, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis of federal government data . And just 7% of all U.S. physicians and surgeons and 7% of registered nurses are Hispanic.

Black Hispanic adults are more likely to report negative health care experiences than other Hispanic adults. Overall, about half of Hispanic adults (52%) say they’ve had at least one of six negative health care experiences asked about in the Center’s 2021 survey, including feeling rushed or having to speak up to get the proper care. This is similar to the share of all U.S. adults who report having at least one of these types of negative experiences.

However, there are notable differences among Hispanics by race. Hispanic Americans who identify as Black are much more likely than White Hispanic adults to have faced negative health care experiences. For instance, 52% of Black Hispanic adults say they’ve had to speak up to get proper care, compared with 31% of White Hispanic adults. And Black Hispanic adults are 15 percentage points more likely than White Hispanic adults to say they’ve received lower-quality care (37% vs. 22%).

While negative health care experiences are fairly common, most Hispanic adults have generally positive opinions about their latest health care interaction. A 56% majority say the quality of care they most recently received from doctors or other health care providers was excellent or very good, while another 28% say it was good. Fewer (14%) say the care they received was only fair or poor. Black and White Hispanic adults are about equally likely to give positive ratings of their most recent health care experience.

Note: Here are the survey  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and its methodology .

• Health Care
• Hispanics/Latinos
• Medicine & Health

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