“We are truly living in a time of giants.” Lofty language like this doesn’t happen often in scientific literature. But the person who wrote them, biologist Jeremy Goldbogen, understands: When it comes to writing about whales, the scale and mystery of their lives can be difficult to overstate. For the past two decades, Goldbogen and his network of collaborators have been piecing together a puzzle: Whales are the largest animals to have ever lived—but why?...
It started as a tiny rash on Nicole Burwell’s calf, appearing at the end of a trip to Las Vegas with her fiancé late in the summer of 2010. “I had this super, super itchy spot on my leg, but not like a mosquito bite. Not raised, not a bump. I couldn’t get it to stop itching,” she says. So Burwell, then 40, took the over-the-counter antihistamine Benadryl and slept the entire four-hour car ride home to Claremont, Calif....
Despite the gains of the #MeToo movement, women still hesitate to file work-related sexual harassment complaints for fear of repercussions. Now a study suggests people may indeed penalize female employees for self-reporting such experiences. Chloe Grace Hart, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Stanford University, ran an experiment five times between late 2017 and early 2018, each time involving about 200 people who identified as male, female or another gender. Hart asked participants to imagine they were the manager of a company considering a fictional female sales associate, named Sarah, for promotion....
Excerpted with permission from Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers, by Scott Bonn. Skyhorse Publishing. Copyright © 2014. Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial homicide is a product of sensationalized and stereotypical depictions of it in the news and entertainment media. Colorful story lines are written to pique the interest of audiences, not to paint an accurate picture of serial murder....
“There are things in that [wall]paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern.” —Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 1892 THE PROTAGONIST in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” suffers from the most notable case of pareidolia in fiction....
In news from the far reaches of the solar system, also known as California, astronomers at Caltech are pushing for a distant body to be recognized as the 10th planet orbiting the sun. The object, currently known by the catchy handle 2003UB313, is more than twice as far away as Pluto. Whether Pluto should even be considered a planet has been the subject of recent debate. According to Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information: “One must never mock the afflicted, of course, but Pluto really is an awful little piece of s**t....
Thrill seeking and poor judgment go hand in hand when it comes to teenagers—an inevitable part of human development determined by properties of a growing but immature brain. Right? Not so fast. A study being published tomorrow turns that thinking upside down: The brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers. Psychologists have long believed that the brain’s judgment-control systems develop more slowly than emotion-governing systems, not maturing until people are in their mid-20s....
Imagine living a life without the ability to relish the delectable sweetness of ice cream, the joy of getting together with an old friend or a small triumph at work. People who suffer from a condition called anhedonia find it hard to enjoy much of anything. They are not necessarily sad, but feel very little pleasure in daily existence—or none at all. Finding the motivation to socialize, take action in the world and access life’s rewards is painfully elusive for them....
Building support for a congressional bill to take on China, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said yesterday that automakers’ grand electric vehicle plans are imperiled by the ongoing shortage of computer semiconductors. “The average electric vehicle has about 2,000 chips, roughly double the average number of chips in a non-electric car,” Raimondo said in prepared remarks to the Detroit Economic Club, a nonprofit business group located in Michigan’s automotive hub. “As companies like Ford and GM compete to grab a foothold in the electric vehicle market, we know that innovation in the American battery market will be stifled if we aren’t also investing in domestic semiconductor innovation at the same time,” Raimondo said....
Construction of the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is set to resume in Hawaii on 15 July after a four-year delay. The project has faced legal challenges and protests over its plans to build the mega-telescope atop Mauna Kea, a mountain that is sacred to Native Hawaiians. With a major court battle now behind the project, “the day for construction to begin has arrived”, said Hawaii governor David Ige on 10 July....
The European Investment Bank will cease lending for fossil fuel projects in two years, officials announced late yesterday. The EIB board of directors adopted the plan after heated debate, with some countries objecting to the inclusion of natural gas in the lending ban. The shift is the boldest measure taken against fossil fuels by a development bank to date, and it may pressure other financial institutions to follow, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank....
Global warming is draining tens of billions of dollars in economic productivity every year from some of the world’s biggest cities, according to new research from the Atlantic Council. The problem is the effect of extreme heat on workers. The report estimated that annual worker productivity losses amounted to $44 billion on average across the 12 cities included in the research. That figure is projected to rise to $84 billion by 2050 unless heat-trapping greenhouse gases are drawn down, the analysis said....
COVID cases are surging again in much of the U.S. as the Delta variant takes hold among unvaccinated populations. Antiviral pills given early in the course of infection to prevent severe COVID symptoms and hospitalizations are still lacking, but a new Biden administration effort hopes to change that. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics (APP) is spending more than $3 billion to support research on drugs not just for coronaviruses but also for other viruses with pandemic potential....
Correction: This article has been modified from the original. The previous version incorrectly attributed the statement about standard tools underestimating the communication skills of bilingual children with autism to Kruti Acharya. Oscar, 6, sits at the family dinner table and endures the loneliest hour of his day. The room bustles with activity: Oscar’s sister passes plates and doles out broccoli florets. His father and uncle exchange playful banter. Oscar’s mother emerges from the kitchen carrying a platter of carved meat; a cousin pulls up an empty chair....
Humanity has just gained its best-ever views of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm large enough to swallow Earth whole that has raged for centuries in the gas-giant planet’s atmosphere. Snapped earlier this week by NASA’s basketball court–size solar-powered Juno spacecraft, the new images from just 9,000 kilometers above Jupiter reveal never-before-seen details of the Great Red Spot and its turbulent surroundings that raise just as many questions as they answer....
Long COVID—the constellation of symptoms that can persist long after an initial coronavirus infection—has been a source of fear among parents throughout the pandemic. But just how often are children affected? Conflicting and evolving messages can leave a parent both terrified and wildly confused. Now a consensus is emerging that long COVID in children is a real risk but a significantly smaller one than some earlier research indicated. Early fears were justified....
School programs for children as young as three years have long been seen by many as little more than institutional babysitting. But recent research has offered renewed evidence that structured math and literacy practice in addition to regular parental involvement in school programs during the first eight years of life can have a major impact on a child’s future educational achievement. Now, a study that included more than 1,500 children in a Chicago-based program called Child-Parent Centers (CPC) shows kids reached a higher level of education by age 35 than did ones enrolled in other preschool programs: CPC participants completed more years of schooling and were more likely to earn a postsecondary degree....
Implantation of electrodes deep within the brain is now commonly performed for treatment of the neurological disorders Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. But the use of deep-brain stimulation, as it is known, is expanding. It is now being assessed in as many as 200 patients for major depression—and is being considered for other disorders such as anorexia. Helen Mayberg, a neurologist from Emory University, has pioneered the use of imaging techniques to understand the functioning of different brain circuits to determine how to tailor various treatments for depression, including deep-brain stimulation, to a patient’s needs....
In an effort to stem the tide of oil washing ashore in Louisiana, small “berms” of sand now plug gaps in barrier islands along the coast. Such structures are intended to provide a barrier to oil penetrating into marshes and other wetlands, where it can persist for decades. Already, more than 250 kilometers of coastline have been touched by the output of the ongoing oil spill, which has now spewed as much as 170 million liters of petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico....
Homeowners eager for green ways to keep their houses cool in the summer and warm in the winter may soon have an alternative to the pink fiberglass insulation they have used for decades. Troy, N.Y.,-based Ecovative Design is testing the ability of its Greensulate—a sustainable building material made from mushroom fibers, rice hulls and recycled paper—to resist temperature change, stop fire and repel water in accordance with American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) International standards....
