Scientific American
Scientific American’s Staff Is Reacting to the CDC’s New Mask Guidance
We asked our vaccinated colleagues whether they planned on keeping their masks on or not and why
The staff at
Scientific American are mostly if not completely vaccinated against COVID-19, and we’re grateful and relieved. An enormous amount of evidence shows that we are almost entirely protected from severe illness or dying of COVID, and more coming out all the time shows that we’re highly unlikely to pass the virus along to other people. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s safe for us to stop wearing masks in most situations. But it’s not that simple. Here’s when, where and why some of us are still wearing masks and when we’re comfortable going without.
Scientific American
Scientific American Staff Is Reacting to the CDC’s New Mask Guidance
We asked our vaccinated colleagues whether they planned on keeping their masks on or not and why
The staff at
Scientific American are mostly if not completely vaccinated against COVID-19, and we’re grateful and relieved. An enormous amount of evidence shows that we are almost entirely protected from severe illness or dying of COVID, and more coming out all the time shows that we’re highly unlikely to pass the virus along to other people. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it’s safe for us to stop wearing masks in most situations. But it’s not that simple. Here’s when, where and why some of us are still wearing masks and when we’re comfortable going without.
Scientific American
Recent findings have implications for the design of prostheses. Care for a third thumb, anyone?
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Person supports a coffee cup with a “third thumb” while stirring a spoon with other fingers. The device was examined in a study that is part of a larger body of research on brain changeability at University College London’s Plasticity Lab. Credit: Dani Clode Design
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Nineteenth-century American clergyman and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher once wrote, “A tool is but the extension of a man’s hand, and a machine is but a complex tool.” These words presaged, by more than a century, a line of scientific research into “embodiment”: how humans’ wealth of sensory inputs including the touch and visual perception involved in manipulating a tool modify the sense of one’s physical self. Embodiment implies that when one holds a screwdriver, for example, the brain morphs its representation of a “hand” until that representation reaches