How can a habit of curiosity, courage, and careful observation power an eternal adventure of unravelling the magic and mystery in the mundane worlds in and around us - forever uncertain, forever fruitful?

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Could we have been better prepared to mitigate the inequitable impact of COVID-19 in the US and globally had we learned the social injustice lessons from previous pandemics and epidemics of the diseases we will study?

Donald Goldmann

Amazing scientific and public health advances have transformed our understanding, prevention, and treatment of infectious diseases—discoveries so profound that they were unimaginable even a generation ago. Yet the global burden of infections remains prodigious, disproportionately affecting low-income countries and vulnerable populations in the United States and other developed economies. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare these stark inequities.... Read more about Infectious Diseases, Pandemics, and Social Injustice (Gen Ed 1129)

Is there alien life beyond Earth?

Dimitar Sasselov

What is it about Earth that enables life to thrive? This question was reinvigorated with the 2016 ground-breaking discovery of a habitable planet around the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. A decade of exploration confirmed that such planets are common in our galaxy, and the commonality of habitable planets has raised anew some age-old questions: Where do we come from? What is it to be human? Where are we going? Are we alone in the universe?... Read more about Life as a Planetary Phenomenon (Gen Ed 1070)

What makes our planet so dangerous?

Brendan Meade

From Mexico to India, San Francisco to Tokyo, natural disasters have shaped both the surface of our planet and the development of civilizations. These catastrophes claim thousands of lives and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage each year, and the impact of natural disasters is only increasing as a result of human population growth and urbanization. This course uses the methods and skills associated with earth science to help you to develop an understanding of both the causes and impacts of these events.... Read more about Natural Disasters (Gen Ed 1098)

How can we critically assess the data, models, and numbers used in making policy and hold to account those with the power to produce them?

Sheila Jasanoff and Sam Weiss Evans

The ability to critically assess numbers, data and models and hold to account those with the power to generate them is a vital capability for every 21st century citizen. This course will give you an increased understanding of why some important ethical and political perspectives fail to enter into the design of the scientific and technical systems that permeate our societies.... Read more about Numbers in Policy and Society (Gen Ed 1173)

How and why do humans try to divine their own futures?

Alyssa Goodman

Human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom properly defined as worriers. We are the only ones who expend tremendous amounts of time, energy, and resources trying (sometimes obsessively) to understand our futures before they happen. While the innate ability of individual people to predict has not changed much in the past few millennia, developments in mathematical and conceptual models have inordinately improved predictive systems.... Read more about Prediction: The Past and Present of the Future (Gen Ed 1112)

How can we (as individuals and as whole societies) better incorporate into our thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques characteristic of science at its best?

Edward J. Hall and Douglas Finkbeiner

We humans have developed rational and systematic methods for solving problems, ways carefully designed to chart a reliable path to the truth. Yet we as individuals, as groups, as whole societies fail to take full advantage of these methods.... Read more about Pride & Prejudice & P-values: Scientific Critical Thinking (Gen Ed 1024)

How can we understand the appeal of psychotherapy, widely recognized as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, and what does it offer that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not?

Elizabeth Lunbeck

What does psychotherapy offer our distressed selves that friends, family, self-help, and psychopharmacological remedies do not? The demand for therapy is currently at an all-time high, bolstering its century-long hegemony as the preferred antidote to human unhappiness and misery, even as it is under sustained attack from critics characterizing it as self-indulgent as well as from platforms that would replace human therapists with chatbots, analysts with algorithms.... Read more about Psychotherapy and the Modern Self (Gen Ed 1179)

If we’re living through the emergence of a highly disruptive technology, namely Chat-GPT and similar generative AI tools, what should we do about it?

Christopher Stubbs & Logan S. McCarty

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) systems such as Chat-GPT have caught the entire world off-guard. They are evolving at a pace that is overwhelming the ability of individuals, organizations, and societies to understand, adjust to, and regulate them. Current-generation GAI tools can write narrative and music, can generate original art, and can write computer programs, all from natural language requests.... Read more about Rise of the Machines? Understanding and Using Generative AI (Gen Ed 1188)

How can we use scientific principles to make better food, for ourselves and for the world?

David Weitz and Pia Sorensen

Food and cooking are part of your everyday life. Whether you are a skilled chef or a home-cook, what you do in the kitchen is deeply rooted in science.... Read more about Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science (Gen Ed 1104)

How does sleep affect your health, your safety, and our society?

Charles Czeisler and Frank A.J.L. Scheer

What is sleep? Why do we sleep? Why don't we sleep? How much sleep do you need? What are circadian rhythms? How do technology and culture impact sleep? This course will explore the role of sleep and circadian timing in maintaining health, improving performance and enhancing safety.... Read more about Sleep (Gen Ed 1038)

Our whole life experience must pass through our sensory systems; are we getting the truth or are we being deliberately misled, and if so, to what purpose?

Eric Heller

Humans perceive sound in amazing and sometimes mysterious ways. This is exploited in many audio experiences and technologies. Using readily available laptops, audio devices, sound sources, and software, students will explore their own and classmates' sound and music perception, including accessible and original collaborative research projects.... Read more about Sound and Music Perception (Gen Ed 1106)

What can we do now to avoid the most serious consequences of climate change, which poses an immediate problem for global society?

Michael B. McElroy

Human induced climate change has the potential to alter the function of natural ecosystems and the lives of people on a global scale. The prospect lies not in the distant future but is imminent. Our choice is either to act immediately to change the nature of our global energy system (abandon our dependence on fossil fuels) or accept the consequences (included among which are increased incidence of violent storms, fires, floods and droughts, changes in the spatial distribution and properties of critical ecosystems, and rising sea level).... Read more about The Challenge of Human Induced Climate Change: Transitioning to a Post Fossil Fuel Future (Gen Ed 1137)

What is a human individual deserving of rights?

David A. Haig

What makes a human? A baby develops from a single cell during the nine months of gestation, but the process that begins so simply has complications that stretch beyond the womb into questions of human identity and individuality.... Read more about The First Nine Months (Gen Ed 1084)

What are you willing to do for the health of others?

Richard Lee

Heart diseases have killed occasional humans since ancient times, but only in the past century have heart diseases become epidemic throughout the world. In fact, the first description of a heart attack in a human was not until 1912.... Read more about The Global Heart Disease Epidemic: Stopping What We Started (Gen Ed 1053)