This month at NYU, researchers found that middle and high school students of all races preferred Black and Latino teachers, and that teachers may be racially biased in referring students for gifted and special education. The gender gap in student math achievement continues to widen, with teachers consistently underrating girls' skills.
NYU experts weighed in on every aspect of a contentious campaign, and game theorists here posited that electoral victory isn't all about winning battleground states. Tracing crops that moved from the "Old World" to the "New World" with the slave trade, biologists compared a type of rice grown in Suriname to a similar kind found in the Ivory Coast. The Wagner School's Andrew Breck found that only 8 percent of fast food eaters make healthy choices based on current calorie count labeling.
A public health survey found that though 80% of Americans were aware of the Zika virus, fewer than 40% knew details about its transmission, symptoms, and complications, and less than a third thought they or their families were at risk. Fifty of 86 business managers questioned in New York City reported encountering drug users in their bathrooms during the past six months.
NYU engineers worked on wearable robotic lower-extremity exoskeletons for military personnel, construction workers, and people with disabilities and explored various methods for improving hardware security for microchips vulnerable to attack.
Over at NYU Langone, medical researchers found kids' and teenagers' over-consumption of sugary drinks is directly tied to their automatic inclusion in combo meals, and that medical problems from low-level daily exposure to hazardous endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in plastic bottles, metal food cans, detergents, flame retardants, toys, cosmetics, and pesticides, cost the U.S. $340 billion annually. On the cancer front, researchers tested a new method for shrinking bladder tumors in patients who cannot tolerate chemotherapy, began robot-assisted surgery for women with endometrial cancer, and concluded that a lot more American men diagnosed with prostate cancer could safely choose to simply monitor the disease rather than opting for immediate surgery or radiation.
In a rock shelter in southwest France, anthropologists discovered a 38,000-year-old engraving—perhaps the earliest known graphic imagery made by modern humans in Western Eurasia. In a library at Indiana University, an NYU archivist discovered home movie footage of a portion of "Think," a lost film installation presented at the 1964 World's Fair.