Can Brushing Your Teeth Impact Dementia? The relationship between oral health and Alzheimer’s11/3/2025 By Gabriella Mouris Every three seconds, someone in the world develops dementia. While most research has focused on the molecular basis of dementia in the brain, new evidence suggests that risk factors might also originate elsewhere in the body. Oral health, while often not paid as much attention to, is increasingly recognized as one such factor. Mounting research indicates that oral disease may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by sustaining low-grade inflammation and circulating microbial by-products throughout the body (Hasturk et al., 2021; Hajishengallis et al., 2022; Ryder, 2020).
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 Illustration by Tenzin Chosang By Veronica Ha Imagine you’re watching a women’s soccer game. A player cuts to the left, pivots on her right leg, and suddenly crumples to the ground. No contact. Just a sharp twist, a scream, and the all-too familiar sight of someone clutching their knees. If it feels like you’ve seen this scene play out a lot in women’s sports, that’s because you have. Female athletes are significantly more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) than their male counterparts, with some studies estimating between 2 to 8 times more likely, depending on their sport [1].
The question is: why? Are women inherently more fragile? (spoiler: no). Is it bad luck? Or is something deeper, more scientific going on?  Illustration by Kamila Giermakowski Rios By Trixie Manaloto The mosquito lands silently, drawn by the warmth of human skin that bled.
Her wings relax as she drinks and drinks until her belly glows red. Until a moment when receptors in her rectum whisper to her brain: “enough.” For days thereafter: No buzz. No bite. Her stomach, overstuffed. She rests, content, as eggs begin to be produced in her brood. What stilled her thirst for blood, and rewired her every mood? A mosquito’s brain doesn’t always decide when to bite you – sometimes, its rectum does.  Illustration by Izzy Liu By Sophia Pires Peixoto Berquo Plastics are the backbone of modern life. Toys? Roughly 90% of them worldwide are plastic. Plastic utensils? The United States alone discards nearly 100 million every day. And plastic products in general? Since the 1950s, humanity has produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic, most of which still lingers in some form. It is undeniable that plastic is all around us. However, that sentence may be more literal than anyone imagined.
 Illustration by Rebecca Sidi Your TikTok feed, the Apple Pay ‘beep’ at checkout, or even the swipe-access system at EVERY single door: all of it is built on ones and zeroes. However, when faced with immense complexity, even supercomputers based on this architecture hit a wall, struggling to process problems with too many variables. The solution to this isn’t a faster computer, but a whole different kind.
By Phoebe Matthew We have all experienced our smiles never looking natural in pictures - too broad, lopsided, or just plain awkward. Surprisingly, this common and seemingly simple phenomenon gives us insight into the functions of various areas of the brain. The brain is often seen as a group of discrete parts that control various aspects of life, including emotions, movement, decision making, and memory. This discrete nature usually goes unnoticed in everyday life, where the different parts of the brain are always acting together. However, comparing our spontaneous smile to our “posed” smile, as we may call it, gives us some insight into two separate systems in our brains. Spontaneous smiles are defined as a smile coming from an emotional response, and posed smiles can be defined as voluntary smiles that are not triggered by an emotion. Although this distinction may be too rigid to be applied to everyday life, it is beneficial when discussing the different parts of the brain as they relate to each other (Korb et al., 2008).
 Illustration by Izzy Liu By Natalie Brogan Gavin Nielsen had just turned two years old when his family received devastating news: a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. For decades, Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), now classified as Diffuse Midline Glioma (DMG), has represented one of the gravest challenges in pediatric oncology. Situated in the brainstem, the part of the brain that controls vital autonomic functions, this aggressive tumor is universally considered fatal.
By Michelle Ding Imagine this. It’s a late afternoon on some random Tuesday. As you make your long trek back from class, something intriguing catches your eye. Against the gum-stained sidewalks, there perches something equal parts bumbling and beautiful. Hues of emerald green and violet glimmer in the sunlight. Quiet coos murmur against the cacophony of the city. Steel gray feathers ruffle gently as you pass; a pair of inquisitive eyes meet yours and for a brief moment, you wonder how you’ve never stopped to admire them before.
Humble avian. Noble messenger. Forgotten companion. Evolutionary masterpiece?  Illustration by Tenzin Chosang By Madeline Lee These days, artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are taking the world by storm due to their applications in industries like medicine, scientific research, and agriculture. AI has numerous uses in the environmental and climate change mitigation sector as well, from charting methane emissions to assisting with precision agriculture. However, despite these benefits, people should also slow down and consider the potential negative impacts of such widely used AI technologies. In particular, AI data centers harm the environment through large energy consumption, which causes increased demand for fossil fuels and puts strain on nearby communities.
 Illustration by Mercedes Luna By Kyra Ezikeuzor Apple has stepped beyond consumer hardware and software to build a fascinating model, SimpleFold, that lets researchers simulate protein folding faster and easier.
SimpleFold is positioned in a field led by Google’s AlphaFold models. Protein folding models are a type of machine learning model known as deep learning models trained on established protein datasets. What’s so useful about these protein folding models is that they can predict the 3D structure of proteins that are essential to drug discovery or fighting antibiotic resistance. Initially, these structures could only have been obtained through time-consuming scientific research, but the creation of models like SimpleFold now expedite that process, improving research in computational medicine and bioinformatics. In fact, John McGeehan, the former director for the Center for Enzyme Innovation, remarked, “What took us months and years to do, AlphaFold was able to do in a weekend.” |