Stories by Meghan McDonough

A grassroots online movement has helped shift the way scientists think about asexuality. But much is still unknown.

Researchers once faced death threats for asking women what gives them pleasure. Now they’re helping individuals and couples figure it out themselves.

Research shows rough sex is becoming more common. Dominatrices are helping the general public catch up.

Some researchers say that the standard definition of sexual orientation is incomplete—and offer a tool for expanding it.

On the Spanish archipelago of the Canary Islands, a group of researchers is racing to fight drought as the climate changes rapidly around them. Their defense is a new approach to a very, very old technology from nature.

The vulva has long been ignored in anatomical study. But scientists and doctors are making strides in mapping its pleasure center, the clitoris, and improving sensation for survivors of genital cutting.

Compared with other diseases with similar economic burdens, research on endometriosis is severely underfunded, in large part because we don’t talk about periods.

The U.S. has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates among developed countries. Researchers from North Carolina to the West Coast are working with parents like Vu-An Foster to understand why.

“Normalizing” infants’ and children’s genital appearance to match a sex assigned in early age isn’t medically necessary and can negatively impact quality of life

Our X and Y chromosomes represent the biggest genetic difference in our species. Medicine routinely ignores their influence. Why?

Nikon’s Small World in Motion video competition is filled with moving delights.

In March 2020 Ruth DeFries finished a manuscript more than five years in the making. It turned out to be both prescient and prophetic. In this document, the Columbia University professor argued that global crises arenow inevitable because of the complexity and interconnectedness of our modern civilization. And just as she wrapped up the project, as she puts it, “all hell broke loose with COVID.”

That manuscript would become a book, released at the end of 2020. “These were exactly the kinds of shocks that I was trying to be convincing [about], in the book, [when I told readers] that they could actually happen,” DeFries says. But her tome is more guide and less screed. It shows that there is good news—and hope—to be found in a model that surrounds all of us every day and that has survived for billions of years: nature.

DeFries points to the shortage of personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer at the start of the pandemic as an example of what she means. Instead of depending on single sources for important goods, she writes, we can look at coral skeletons and the tiny veins of dragonfly wings and leaves. They loop into one another, creating what is called a redundant network. That way, for instance, if a bug takes a bite of a leaf, it can still transport water and sugar to the rest of the plant. In the face of uncertainty, one of the best ways we can protect ourselves is to invest in flexibility—such as by maintaining a diverse set of trade partners when it comes to both food and medical supplies.

The idea that we should observe nature when designing our modern world has ancient roots in Indigenous cultures. But the common scientific term for this approach is only a couple of decades old: “biomimicry” according to Lex Amore, who directs partnerships and advocacy at the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute, “is the conscious emulation of nature’s genius.”

Copying nature’s strategies can have real-world benefits when we’re put in a tough spot. For example, in March 2020 northern Italy–based manufacturer COPANwas impacted by COVID-19, which led to a nationwide shortage of diagnostic nasal swabs in the U.S. In response, a network of scientists and industry partners in Boston mobilized to source and manufacture new designs. As part of this effort, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University drew inspiration from an unlikely place: cat tongues. The team’s lead engineer Richard Novak ended up designing injection-molded nasal-testing swabs modeled on a feline’s oral multitool.

This kind of nature-inspired thinking is needed now more than ever because “the solutions we seek are right outside,” Amore says. Her organization supports innovations that not only serve humans in the short term but that, in its words, also sustainably “create conditions conducive to life”—for all species.

The novel coronavirus has created conditions that are less than conducive to human life, and there will likely be more existential shocks to follow. Beyond the pandemic, we still have to deal with the fact that humans have altered 70 percent of the planet’s land surface and compromised two thirds of its oceans. As a result, 20 percent of all species are facing near-term extinction, and the world is warming.

It used to be easy to go through our daily lives and ignore the invisible processes that keep us afloat. This was a delusion, DeFries says. “We depend on nature for food, for water, for taking care of our wastes, for air, for everything,” she adds. The pandemic perhaps shook us out of our routines. The thing to do now, according to DeFries, is to deepen this dependency. “The more connected we are, the more we become a complex system, which is more and more like nature,” she says.

Synthetic voices have become ubiquitous. They feed us directions in the morning, shepherd us through phone calls by day and broadcast the news on smart speakers at night. And as the technology used to make them improves, these voices are becoming more and more human-sounding. This is the final frontier in synthetic speech: replicating not just what we say but how we say it.

Rupal Patel heads a research group at Northeastern University that studies speech prosody—the changes in pitch, loudness and duration that we use to convey intent and emotion through voice. “Sometimes people think of it as the icing on the cake,” she explains. “You have the message, and now it’s how you modulate that message, but I really think it’s the scaffolding that gives meaning to the message itself.”

Patel says she grew interested in prosody after finding it was the only element of vocal communication that seemed to be available to people with some kinds of severe speech disorders. These patients were able to make expressive sounds even if they could not speak clearly. In 2014 Patel founded a company to build custom synthetic voices for nonspeaking individuals. VocaliD has since expanded to commercial brands and influencers.

Synthetic speech has come a long way over the years. At age nine, Siri is the oldest virtual assistant—but in the world of speaking machines, she’s a baby. People have been trying to synthesize speech since at least the 18th century, when an Austro-Hungarian inventor built a crude replica of the human vocal tract that could articulate entire phrases (albeit in a monotone).

Current machine-learning techniques can model human speech, complete with awkward pauses and lip smacks. Still, training on thousands of samples per second is prohibitively expensive for most real-world systems. Researchers, including those at VocaliD, are continually implementing newer and more efficient methods.

But even as the remaining gaps between human and synthetic speech are steadily closing, truly lifelike prosody continues to elude even the most sophisticated systems. Maybe what’s still missing requires machines not only to mimic humans but also to feel like us.