News Articles

A new analysis highlights a concerned trend among those with extreme obesity; though obesity is currently the third greatest lifestyle killer, behind only cigarettes and alcohol, the analysis of  11.6 million surgical cases from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) between 2005 and 2022 found that people with the highest levels of obesity are undergoing fewer surgical procedures overall.

If you've ever tried to use a dating app, you may think asexual reproduction would be better than seeing someone 15 years older than their photo arrive at the restaurant but from an evolutionary perspective, it wasn't quite a dead end, but it was a slow crawl.

A 1979 seismic event was a different kind of earthquake, and it is has intrigued scientists ever since.A new look at old data has provided some additional answers.On Feb. 24th, 1979, seismographs recorded a magnitude 3.8 earthquake under Randolph, Utah, located near the Idaho and Wyoming borders. Yet no one felt a thing and the seismic data made no obvious sense. Because its focal depth was 50 miles below sea level, the hypocenter wasn't in Earth’s crust, it was well into the upper mantle.

In times of social rancor and strife, most will fight each other, but societies are saved by those who think about the bigger issue.There is a lesson humans could learn from wasps. Polistes canadensis
wasps are more like China than a democracy, so when their ruler dies, power struggles and social turmoil result. Amidst the violence and chaos, individuals compensate by helping the group rather than fighting each other.

Europe alone has so much unpublished, un-catalogued biological data that it is challenging to take surveys and estimates about extinction risk and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the EU's claim it will protect 30 percent of land and sea by 2030 seriously. A new paper revealed government's don't even know what they are not protecting already. The work revealed 40 years of gathered but never published data on marine amphipods - crustaceans - just in Italy. One type of crustacean in one country isn't even understood yet.

Though numerical models and popular films like An Inconvenient Truth projected Arctic ice collapse due to global warming and then climate change, the reverse was true in the real world. Ice expanded. That changed in 2015 and a new model estimates why. The authors say the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica has gotten warmer, bringing salty water from the deep up to the surface.Those water changes led to record-breaking lows in 2023, which could destabilize the world’s ocean current systems, and it will be due to three changes.In 2013, they write stronger winds led to salty Circumpolar Deep Water getting closer to the surface.

You may have read that Asian cultures respect the elderly more than Europe but Asian senior citizens may not agree. However, it may not be that young people have gotten less respectful, it could be that young people are wealthier than in the past. And that makes them lonelier.Over the last 40 years, the wealth of countries like the United States and Japan have increased substantially. Poor people now have a life that the poor even two generations ago could not imagine would be possible. Yet a new cross-temporal meta-analysis says that despite the changes in wealth which make socializing more possible, young people report more loneliness.

A new tool drawing on billions of uses of more than 20,000 words and diverse real-world texts claims to have found that human language is systematically biased, but not against things. It is instead biased toward safety and that has impacted everything from psychology claims to how Large Language Models (LLMs, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence and AI).

There are concerns about projected warming on the Earth’s surface and in the lower atmosphere even while the planet’s upper atmosphere has cooled.It's not a paradox, it's a pattern and a recent paper described the mechanics of how it works. The short answer is that carbon dioxide (CO2) reacts differently to wavelengths of light. Closer to earth, CO2 traps it but it makes the stratosphere better at radiating, which cools it—but because it becomes colder, the Earth system ends up losing less heat to space overall, strengthening warming below.

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as  folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia. 

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.