Most dog owners will say that dogs understand tone, and interpret that rather than words, and that most dogs do not learn words (i.e. names of objects), unless extensively trained, but a new analysis shows that is not always the case.

Some dogs have some exceptional abilities and can learn new words after hearing them only four times. A new study by the Family Dog Project is just what it sounds like; investigating dogs who seem to learn words in the absence of any formal training by simply being exposed to playing with their owners in the typical way owners do, in a human family.

The Arsinoite nome (now called Faiyum) region 60 miles south-west of Cairo was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire but by the end of the third century most settlements there had been abandoned.

The problem was climate change. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the new dryness and desertification of the farmland didn't work and they had to move.

Nature gave the area a one-two punch. Climate data indicates that the monsoon rains at the headwaters of the Nile in the Ethiopian Highlands suddenly and permanently weakened, which meant lower high-water levels of the entire river in summer, while a tropical volcanic eruption in 266, which in the following year brought a below-average flood of the Nile, also played a role.

In January of 2020 we began to write about "coronavirus 2019" due to concern regarding increased cases of pneumonia during a mild flu season, while the Chinese dictatorship was denying there was any problem at all. Just over a week later a key whistleblower in Wuhan, Li Wenliang, turned up dead after being arrested and held prisoner for a month by the communist government for "rumor-mongering."

In 1975, four percent of school-age kids were overweight and the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration says that was up to 18 percent in 2016. Like with smoking and alcoholism, obesity is often a pediatric disease - people who start early are far more likely to keep doing it in adulthood. 

Obese people have shorter life expectancy and risk factors like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease and the easiest indicator for obesity is weight gain.

I know, Google has been around for decades by now, and nobody should be surprised to learn how easy they have made the life of information seekers, among other things (I am also an addict of their search engine, scholar, maps, trends, and gmail utilities). But my mouth still dropped today as I discovered their "ngram viewer". 
It happened by chance. I was trying to find out whether "as best as possible" is really a correct English phrase, or if it is just a tad slang, and the google search pointed to a page where the matter was settled by a cool graph:

After suffering 80 percent losses in sugar beet crops due to the yellows virus, and now being free from the EU's activist-dominated politicization of science, the UK has decided to put a halt to the 80 percent decline and reverse course for crops before farmers went bankrupt.

If someone elderly with blood clots and cancer treatment dies from respiratory distress, the federal government is generous about calling it a COVID-19 death. Even gunshot victims are considered COVID-19 related if they had tested positive for the virus in the last 30 days. Meanwhile, China has been denying that they have any at all since March, and no one can disprove them because they destroyed the records from the Wuhan lab where they were experimenting with SARS on pangolins and only recently let the World Health Organisation in to look at carefully curated records.

In 11 multi-method experiments involving more than 4,000 total participants designed to investigate the effect a victim's fit to the concept of a typical woman had on participants' view of sexual harassment and the consequences of that mental association, it was found that women who do not fit female stereotypes are less likely to be seen as victims of sexual harassment. 

If they claim they were harassed, they are less likely to be believed.

The NIH Treatment Guidelines Panel recently changed ivermectin from firmly “against” to the neutral “neither for nor against” when it comes to mild COVID-19 treatment. Ivermectin, developed in 1975, led to the eradication of numerous parasitic diseases and earned the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for its discoverers, Dr. William Campbell and Dr. Ōmura Satoshi. It is considered safe and cheap but like another famous drug, the malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine, its claims about COVID-19 are more anecdote than science. In vitro studies are fine exploratory efforts but were only shown to do anything positive at doses far exceeding realistic human levels, unworkable for mild COVID-19.

Computers are well-known for being able to recover information quickly - a Google search will often give you the result you wanted as you type, even if you make spelling errors - but are not known for creativity. They are good for storage and retrieval.

A new study finds those may be flipped. The distinction was never absolute anyway. Though it was only in 1996 that a computer beat a chess champion, computers beat lower quality players all of the time. And our memory may be better than we think, it is instead that the brain strategy for storing memories may lead to imperfect memories, while allowing it to store more memories easier than Artificial Intelligence.