Credit: Charlie Ehlert, University of Utah Health ‘Seeing others suffer is too stressful’ Altruism and a lack of access and affordability are three reasons why people with chronic illnesses are turning to the “black market” for medicines and supplies, new research shows. Scientists at University of Utah Health and University […]
Credit: Junior Libby/public domain It’s hard to comprehend why someone would deliberately light a bushfire. Yet this behavior regularly occurs in Australia and other countries. We would go a long way to preventing bushfires if we better understood this troubling phenomenon. Experts estimateabout 85% of bushfires are caused by humans. A person may […]
Why is it that people find songs such as James Taylor’s “Country Roads,” UB40’s “Red, Red Wine,” or The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” so irresistibly enjoyable? In a recently published study researchers analyze 80,000 chords in 745 classic U.S. Billboard pop songs—including those three—and find that musical pleasure comes from the […]
Greater education, lower fertility rates. Credit: Earth Policy Institute A global coalition of 11,000 scientists has come up with a planfor dealing with the climate emergency. Most of these are things scientists have been saying for a while: decarbonise the economy, eliminate pollutants, restore ecosystems and reforest, and reduce meat […]
In a study using machine-generated art to understand what makes a picture memorable, researchers found that the images people remembered best had bright colors, simple backgrounds, and subjects centered prominently in the frame. Credit: Image courtesy of the researchers What makes an image memorable? Ask a computer. From the “Mona […]
Kids these days, amiright? (Credit: aastock/Shutterstock) Ugh. Kids these days. They’ve got no respect. They dress all weird. They’re always on their phones. And don’t get me started on their music! Versions of this argument have echoed through editorials, taverns, hair salons and Roman bathhouses for millennia. Kids these days […]
(Image: © Shutterstock) Here’s the reality: We’re messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of colonizing another orb when we’re done with our own are wishful thinking. That’s according to Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year for discovering the first planet […]
An aerial view of trucks queueing on the BR163 in Brazil’s Para state—one of two major transport routes that have played a key role in the development and destruction of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest Trucker Erik Fransuer spends months at a time driving back and forth on highways […]
Manmade carbon emissions have seen CO2 levels rise two thirds in a span of a few centuries Human activity churns out up to 100 times more planet-warming carbon each year as all the volcanoes on Earth, says a decade-long study released Tuesday. The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a 500-strong international […]
Modern-day baby feeding from reconstructed infant feeding vessel of the type investigated here. Credit: Helena Seidl da Fonseca A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, has found the first evidence that prehistoric babies were fed animal milk using the equivalent of modern-day baby bottles. Possible infant feeding […]