Got It Covered: Emory in the News
Ancient remedies, modern-day crisis
Emory ethnobotanist Cassandra Quave was featured in The New York Times Magazine in September for her leading research in botanical medicine. Quave has turned to plant-based remedies to develop “promising candidates for a new generation of drugs that might help resolve one of the greatest threats to public health today: an increasing number of disease-causing bacteria are rapidly evolving immunity to every existing antibiotic.” According to the article, the widespread emergence of resistant bacteria already claims 700,000 lives a year, and experts conservatively predict that by 2050, they will kill 10 million annually—one person every three seconds. “We’re standing on the precipice of a post-antibiotic era,” Quave says. “We just haven’t fallen off yet.”
Dinosaur tracker
Anthony Martin, Emory palaeontologist and professor of environmental studies, was featured on Radio Australia in September in a report celebrating the continent’s rich abundance of dinosaur tracks, which yield new findings nearly every week. Martin was part of a team that discovered Australia’s oldest known bird tracks, estimated to be 105 million years old. He said the tracks have been beautifully preserved. “The tracks show a beautiful mark caused by the back toe dragging in the sand, which indicates the bird was flapping its wing and coming in for a soft landing,” he said. “Discoveries like these help us better understand avian evolution.”
Rich and alone
Wealthy people tend to spend more time alone and less time socializing with family and neighbors, according to a study from Emily Bianchi, assistant professor at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, published in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science in May. Bianchi says the reason may lie with social support networks. Because the wealthy have money for anything they might need, they are less likely to rely on neighbors or friends for help and therefore have less incentive to stay connected. The study was covered by The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic and New York Magazine.
Carol Anderson’s White Rage
In August 2014, Carol Anderson, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies at Emory, wrote an editorial for The Washington Post about public perception of protests and looting after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. She called Ferguson “the latest outbreak of white rage,” the result of white backlash against African American advancement. The piece was one of The Washington Post’s most-read articles of the year and drew more than 5,000 online comments. A literary agent contacted Anderson and encouraged her to expand her piece into a book. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide was reviewed by The New York Times (Editor’s Choice review), The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail (UK).
