Should lecturers provide students with different types of homework to choose from? In a semester-long experiment, I show that students tend to shy away from assignments that seem challenging, and subsequently struggle with these topics on the final exam. In contrast, students who are forced to complete assignments that they initially wanted to avoid improve their final exam performance.

Research entails asking questions and wringing answers from nature using experiments. What then about very hard experiments? Who wants to perform a hard experiment a large number of times? Your computer is who! By building computational models capturing aspects of nature, we can provide answers, and we did so in biology to answer a question about inheritance of important cellular structures.

Currently many researchers believe that having high blood pressure during a pregnancy can be a sign someone will have cardiovascular disease later in life. But a lot of research has not had data big enough to get details. We found that people with the most common type of high blood pressure during pregnancy had no increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but rare types had up to 10X risk.