Sara Zaske

1 week ago | techxplore.com | Sara Zaske |Sadie Harley |Robert Egan

Open-heart surgery is a hard thing to practice in the real world, and airplane pilots cannot learn from their mistakes midair. These are some scenarios where virtual reality solves really hard problems, but the technology has limits. That's the upshot of a review of experimental research on VR, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. "Virtual reality is not for everything," said Jeremy Bailenson, lead author and director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

1 month ago | humsci.stanford.edu | Sara Zaske

In a recent study, White Americans who backed diversity for “instrumental” rather than moral reasons also tended to have views that support an unequal system in society. Instrumental arguments in higher education emphasize diversity’s practical benefits, such as saying it fuels innovation or helps students prepare for a globalized economy. These arguments are common in university marketing and have been a hallmark of legal cases for race-based admissions for almost 50 years.

2 months ago | medicalxpress.com | Sara Zaske

Most people have right-dominant hearts—which to a doctor or a researcher means they have an artery that extends from the right side of their hearts to supply oxygenated blood to the back side. For some people, this artery, called the posterior descending artery, comes from the left side or from both directions. A study has found that the gene CXCL12 is connected to this artery's formation and that its directional pattern is set very early in human development.

2 months ago | copernical.com | Sara Zaske

'Microlightning' in water droplets may have sparked life on Earthby Sara Zaske for Stanford NewsStanford CA (SPX) Mar 17, 2025 Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller "microlightning" exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.

2 months ago | terradaily.com | Sara Zaske

'Microlightning' in water droplets may have sparked life on Earthby Sara Zaske for Stanford NewsStanford CA (SPX) Mar 17, 2025 Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller "microlightning" exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves.