For Yet Better Science

Maria Sibylla Merian  (2 April 1647 – 13 January 1717 ) was a German  entomologist ,  naturalist  and  scientific illustrator . She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the  Frankfurt  branch of the Swiss  Merian family .

Lydia Villa-Komaroff  (born August 7, 1947) is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman. She was the third   Mexican-American  woman in the  United States  to receive a doctorate degree in the sciences (1975) and is a co-founding member of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science ( SACNAS ).  Her most notable discovery was in 1978 during her post-doctoral research, when she was part of a team that discovered how bacterial cells could be used to generate  insulin .

Maria Mitchell was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI that was later known as "Miss Mitchell's Comet" in her honor. She won a gold medal prize for her discovery, which was presented to her by King Christian VIII of Denmark in 1848.

Virginia Apgar was an American physician, obstetrical anesthesiologist and medical researcher, best known as the inventor of the Apgar Score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child immediately after birth in order to combat infant mortality.

The human mind takes shortcuts by using past experiences to fill in missing information. This special talent helped our forebears avoid unfamiliar dangers and facilitated the development of modern civilization. Today, it allows us to quickly size up new social situations and connect with complete strangers. As researchers, it helps us see patterns in nature that explain how the world works. But this inherently human characteristic has its flaws. In its most benign manifestation, our reliance on shortcuts makes us susceptible to optical illusions or a magician’s slight of hand. More troubling, our tendency to fill in missing facts by making broad generalizations can lead us to draw erroneous conclusions about our fellow researchers and the quality of their work.  

In 2021, Facebook made “metaverse” the buzziest word on the web, rebranding itself as Meta and announcing a plan to build “a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world.” Since then, the metaverse has been called many different things. Some say it is the “future of the internet.” Others call it “an amorphous concept that no one really wants.” For  Diego Gómez-Zará , an assistant professor in the University of Notre Dame’s  Department of Computer Science and Engineering , the metaverse is something else: a tool for better science.  

The founders of a biotech firm that launched at a UCSF start-up incubator in 2012 with promises of a groundbreaking fecal testing system are facing fraud charges in a case that’s not merely reminiscent of the notorious Theranos scandal, but tangentially connected to it. In 2021,  federal prosecutors charged  the founders of uBiome, Zach Apte, who received a PhD from UCSF in 2012, and Jessica Richman of defrauding investors of $76 million. Prosecutors say they are now fugitives.