Month: March 2022

Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, “Like,” click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand. And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much. That’s changed with a…

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“No, no, no, no, Brian. No, no, no, no.” I had asked Stephen Emlen, a Cornell emeritus professor of neurobiology and behavior, what seemed to me an obvious question: When he brought birds into planetariums in the 1960s and 70s, did they ever, um, make a mess in there? “No poops in the planetarium,” Emlen assures me. I had called Emlen to talk not about poops, but a series of experiments that have captured my…

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The US military’s official report on UFOs is here, and its conclusion is scintillating: There’s some stuff in the sky, the government isn’t sure what it is, there’s no evidence that it’s aliens, but also no one’s ruling out aliens. So in conclusion, the UFOs are part of life’s rich pageant and anything is possible. The nine-page report released by the Director of National Intelligence’s (DNI) office last week, formally titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial…

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The Pacific Northwest is sweltering under a record-breaking heat wave. Portland reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit this week. Seattle reached 108 degrees. Vancouver reached 89 degrees. The searing heat has buckled roads, melted power cables, and led to a spike in deaths. It’s especially concerning in a region like the Pacific Northwest, where few buildings have air conditioners. This follows weeks of extremely high temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere and an early-season heat wave in North…

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Football League Results Division 2 Down 0-14 Offaly 0-15 Division 3 Antrim 1-19 Longford 0-12 Westmeath 1-12, Limerick 1-6 ********** Advertisement OFFALY KEPT THEIR Division 2 survival hopes alive today with a massive comeback win on the road against Down. The Faithful county were 0-15 to 0-14 winners after a dramatic finish in Páirc Esler, Newry. Corner back Lee Pearson fisted over the decisive point in the 72nd minute, as the Faithful county came from…

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Take a long enough lens — say, 25 years — and it seems as though health care in America is inarguably getting better. People are living longer than they did a quarter century ago. The burden of disease, a metric that includes premature deaths and disability, has dropped. The number of avoidable hospitalizations and hospital errors is lower. But below those rosy numbers is the truth: American health care has been falling behind other countries…

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UL 0-12 UCC 0-11 UL CAPTAIN FIADHNA Tangney scored 0-4 as her side were crowned Yoplait O’Connor Cup champions again after a thrilling win over UCC. The holders held a 0-10 to 0-4 lead at half-time and they went on to make it five titles since 2014 at a wet and windy DCU Dóchas Éireann. But it was not without a scare, UCC came with a late fightback and they almost got level before the…

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The Covid-19 epidemic in the United States risks becoming a tale of “two Americas,” as Anthony Fauci warned in June: a nation where regions with higher vaccination rates are able to beat back the coronavirus, while those with lower vaccination rates continue to see cases and deaths. At face value, it’s a division between those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated. But, increasingly, it’s also a division between Democrats and Republicans — as…

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After learning that the venom of a Gila monster lizard contained hormones that can regulate blood sugar, Daniel Drucker started wondering why. And could the venom somehow help treat diabetes? Drucker is a scientist and endocrinologist at the University of Toronto who has dedicated his career to understanding the universe of hormones in the body, which do everything from regulating appetite to helping with digestion. His curiosity about the Gila monster led to a call…

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