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September 2005

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[Harper’s Index]

Increase in the value of all U.S. stocks between 1995 and 2000, as a percentage of GDP : 59

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that a U.S. job created since 2001 has been in a housing-related field : 2 in 5

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of consecutive years that the value of housing in Japan has dropped since its housing bubble burst : 14

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of years that the world’s tallest hotel has stood uncompleted in North Korea : 13

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of consecutive years that China has jailed more reporters than any other nation : 6

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Asian-Americans whose primary source of news is not in English : 25

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Increase in the total value of U.S. residential property since 2000, expressed as a percentage of GDP : 60

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Year in which perfluorochemicals, used in Teflon and other nonstick products, were first introduced : 1956

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Numeral whose underlying concept has been partially understood by a Massachusetts parrot, according to scientists

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of U.S. children who now have one of these nonbiodegradable chemicals in their bloodstreams : 96

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount that pharmaceutical companies spent on R&D in 1997 per new drug they launched : $868,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount last year : $1,430,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount allocated for investigating health-care fraud in 2003 that the FBI cannot account for : $114,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of prescription drugs currently under investigation for Medicaid price-gouging or marketing fraud : 500

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage markup that Abbott Laboratories charged in 2001 on solutions of sodium chloride, i.e., salt water : 20,735

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Year by which Brazil’s government will have switched its computers entirely to open-source software : 2010

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount they expect the switch will save each year : $48,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of Danish graduate students who last December released a copyright-free recipe for an “open-source beer‚” : 15

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of times the website has been accessed so far : 133,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Average amount an Ohio man paid children to berate him for being obese, until he was arrested in April : $30

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Average number of $75 anal bleachings that an L.A.-area salon performs each day : 5

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of chickens trained by European scientists to choose between photos of human faces by pecking : 6

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Chances that college students select as “most desirable‚” the same face chosen by the chickens : 49 in 50

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount it paid a consultancy to conduct “social marketing‚” of mosquito nets : $7,600,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Amount the U.S. spent last year on mosquito nets to fight malaria in Africa : $4,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of times that the U.N. has extended its peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone : 11

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Ratio of the number of peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, per capita, to that in Afghanistan : 24:1

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Ratio of the world’s reconstruction aid given to postwar Kosovo, per capita, to that given postwar Afghanistan : 23:1

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Stipend that a CIA scholarship program gives annually to undisclosed undergraduates for overseas “fieldwork‚” : $25,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Minimum number of American universities with their own student-run erotic magazine : 6

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage who do so in districts where a majority of students are black or Latino : 40

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Average percentage of students in New York State’s majority-white school districts who graduate in four years : 79

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Chance that a teacher in a U.S. public school is a man : 1 in 5

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Total annual spending controlled by functionally illiterate U.S. consumers : $414,000,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Total paid by U.S. catastrophe insurers since 1984 for claims due to “civil disorders‚” : $1,100,000,000

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Number of anti-globalization protesters who were tortured last year by Mexican officials : 19

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Months after his 2004 defeat that Ralph Nader said the Democratic Party had made him feel “like a nigger ‚” : 7

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Rank of “time to buy‚” in the futures markets, among the first thoughts Brit Hume said he had after the London bombings : 1

September 2005
[Harper’s Index]

Percentage of Arab Americans for whom this is true : 40

September 2005
[Article]

Unbreakable wonder
by ,
[Article]

For whom the ring tones
by ,
[illustration]

Tokyo Hans
Art by ,
[Article]

Do not pass out
by ,
[Article]

The Little Red Pack
Translated by ,
[Article]

Family values
by ,
[Article]

Grandma’s little helper
Translated by ,
[Article]

Know your enemy
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled pool #6, Cascais, Portugal
by ,
[Article]

Be prepared
by ,
[Article]

Caught in the web
by ,
[illustration]

Field
by ,Art by ,
[Article]

Keeps on tickin’
by ,
[Article]

Company watch
by ,
[illustration]

Ancient branding (detail)
Art by ,
[Poetry]

The lower house
by ,
[Fiction]

AAA plus
by ,
[illustration]

80
Art by ,
[Illustration]

The problem we all live with
Art by ,
[Letters]

Letters
by ,
[Notebook]

Civil obedience
by ,
[Harper’s Index]

Harper’s index
by ,
[Article]

Fighting for the Supreme Court

How right-wing judges are transforming the Constitution

by ,
[Report]

Still Separate, Still Unequal

America’s educational apartheid

by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Collection]

Commencements and departures
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Photography]

Untitled
by ,
[Article]

Affirmative reaction

When campus Republicans play the diversity card

by , , , ,Edited by ,
[Fiction]

Trample the dead, hurdle the weak
by ,
[New Books]

New books
by ,
[Reviews]

A cool heat

The intrepid genius of Edmund Wilson

by ,
[Reviews]

Hello, beautiful

What we talk about when we talk about beauty

by ,
[Puzzle]

Triskaidekacode
by ,
[Findings]

Findings
by ,
[Findings]

Bay Area researchers debuted a Narcissism Interview Scale for Employment.

[Findings]

More than half of U.S. civilians tasked with evaluating a bombing target endorsed killing unidentified bystanders.

[Findings]

Solitary chicks emit fewer anxious peeps if given a mirror for company.

[Findings]

Marine biologists described the Red Sea’s grumpy dwarfgoby.

[Findings]

Bottlenose dolphins, who were found to inhale and exhale microplastics, respond to a smile with a smile one third of the time.

[Findings]

Archaeologists identified the skeleton recovered from the Sverresborg Castle’s well in 1938 as the man described in the Sverris Saga as having been thrown into the well in 1197.

[Findings]

A primatologist, a mammalogist, and a linguist concluded that the jerky, rhythmic dance of sexually mature female black crested gibbons is innate rather than culturally transmitted.

[Findings]

Parmesan researchers found that “benevolently sexist” adults are less likely to own “clit-oriented” sex toys.

[Findings]

Germans under thirty experience more climate distress and have more rough sex.

[Findings]

Mars gained and then lost a second moon in the autumn.

[Findings]

Scientists determined why some aging gray horses turn white faster than others.

[Findings]

The stranger churches of sixteenth-century London extensively spied on their congregants, noting when women accused other women of being “pocked whores.”

[Findings]

Evidence supporting the hypothesis that the Proto­-Indo­-European language was spread by humans on horseback may have overlooked how humans who ride cows, donkeys, and wild asses exhibit the same hip­ -socket deformations, as previously observed in twentieth­-century nuns.

[Findings]

Scientists allowed a king oyster mushroom mycelial culture to control the movements of a soft five-limbed robot and a four-wheel vehicle.

[Findings]

Juvenile Japanese eels can escape from the stomachs of dark sleepers by pushing their tails back through the fish’s esophagus and out its gills.

[Findings]

EEG experts disagreed on whether, in the future, brain waves could be used to read dreams and long-­term memories.

[Findings]

Turkish doctors reported a case of penile autoamputation with religious delusion.

[Findings]

AI researchers determined that large language models pose no existential threat to humanity and created an AI algorithm that can detect scientific articles written by other AI algorithms.

[Findings]

Mammoths may have been killed with planted pikes rather than with thrown spears.

[Findings]

The birth of a white buffalo fulfilled a Lakota prophecy portending better times.

[Findings]

Wildfires near Canadian mines were found to have released unprecedented levels of arsenic, and wildfires in Maui were making residents unhappy.

[Findings]

Living near oil and gas development sites depresses people who are trying to get pregnant.

[Findings]

The Journal of Pediatric Genetics retracted a study on Islamic beliefs concerning the possible supernatural causes of birth defects on the grounds that the research lacked a scientific basis.

[Findings]

A researcher noticed that a Tartessian slate tablet depicting battle scenes also contains a previously unknown alphabet.

[Findings]

The royal swan marker reported that the depression of the Thames population, previously noted during the late queen’s reign, continues under the king.

[Findings]

Researchers claimed that researchers have been underreporting same-­sex sexual activity among animals.

[Findings]

Cocaine trafficking was found to threaten the golden­-cheeked warbler.

[Findings]

A survey of 7 million parliamentary speeches across eight countries and several decades found that politicians use less complex language as it gets hotter.

[Findings]

The diet of Japanese youth is growing more confectionary, and Americans are poisoning themselves more severely.

[Findings]

Unaffiliated voters are growing more spiteful toward both Democrats and Republicans.

[Findings]

Researchers debuted an 88 percent accurate hate­-speech detector and a superior sarcasm detector and may be able to send messages back in time.

[Findings]

Increased border­-wall height was tentatively linked to a thirtyfold increase in the rate of migrant drowning deaths off San Diego.

[Findings]

Women bond more closely with therapy bulls than men do.

[Findings]

The perceived onset of old age increases by approximately one year for every four to five years a person ages.

[Findings]

A study of brain­-injured but not brain­-dead patients found that many would have survived had their families not chosen to withdraw life support.

[Findings]

Sets of both fraternal and identical twins exhibit internally similar metacognitive abilities, suggesting that metacognition is environmental rather than heritable.

[Findings]

Southern California beach erosion is expected to increase by 50 percent by 2050.

[Findings]

Archaeologists translated cuneiform tablets recording shareholder agreements for the first company in Anatolia.

[Findings]

The melting of the poles is making Earth’s days longer.

[Findings]

The hatching season of a male spear squid (Heterololigo bleekeri) determines whether he will pursue bold or sneaky mating tactics.

[Findings]

A bionic eye deciphered a scroll carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that reveals the burial place of Plato, who was found to have complained about the musical abilities of the enslaved Thracian girl who played the flute for him as he lay dying.

[Findings]

Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose.

[Findings]

Toxicity has remained a consistent feature of online interactions since 1989.

[Findings]

Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas.

[Findings]

A metal scar on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816-310 indicated that it has cannibalized other bodies in its orbit.

[Findings]

An orca acting alone killed a great white shark and ate its liver.

[Findings]

Genomic analysis indicated that psychedelic mushrooms emerged around the time of the Mesozoic–Cenozoic mass extinction.

[Findings]

The playing speed of a metal guitarist directly correlates with his intrasexual competitiveness but not his mating success.

[Findings]

Depression in humans is correlated with higher body temperature, and cold-water swimming mitigates menopause symptoms.

[Findings]

Researchers warned that, as temperatures rise, humans should prepare for more diarrhea.

[Findings]

A mother is 4.6 percent more likely to give birth in the same month she was born, and adjacent siblings are 12.1 percent more likely to be born in the same month as one another.

[Findings]

Electric eel discharge transforms the DNA of zebrafish larvae.

[Findings]

An AI that was fed the employment and health data of six million Danes turned out to be more accurate than existing sociological methods at predicting if a given person was about to die.

[Findings]

Onshore wind turbines severely deter German bats from foraging.

[Findings]

Astrophysicists argued that the development of advanced alien technology requires an atmosphere composed of at least 18 percent oxygen.

[Findings]

Off the Five Finger Islands, a team of cetologists aboard the Glacier Seal conducted an extended conversation with a female humpback named Twain.

[Findings]

True crabs independently evolved to live out of the ocean up to seventeen times.

[Findings]

The average American girl born in 2019 will take prescription drugs for more than half her life.

[Findings]

The U.S. municipal bond market penalizes communities in proportion to the percentage of their population that is black but generally ignores their vulnerability to climate change.

[Findings]

Somalis, surveyed as proxies for earlier inhabitants of the Cradle of Humankind, were found to fear spiders less than scorpions but snakes to the expected degree.

[Findings]

The collapse of the Qing Dynasty was driven by the quadrupling of its population and consequent rural impoverishment, an overabundance of qualified applicants for elite academic degrees, rising costs and trade deficits, and falling productivity, which were variously associated with internal unrest, opium imports, and the depletion of silver reserves.

[Findings]

Geoscientists were confident that, given access to the oldest barnacles on the flaperon of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, they could help pinpoint its crash site.

[Findings]

Scientists were not certain whether the globally synchronized waves observed in the brains of wakeful rats on ketamine or LSD were a cause or a symptom of hallucinations.

[Findings]

Neuropsychologists developed a shorter IQ test for children with shorter attention spans.

[Findings]

The depression-prone are less attracted to the political right.

[Findings]

The nocturnal heart rate of young men can be predicted by their female partners’ daytime feelings of intimacy or annoyance.

[Findings]

Men who pose for photos with cats are seen as less datable.

[Findings]

Men can rate the facial attractiveness of women without paying attention, but women cannot do the same for men; gay men find the faces of purportedly fertile women and men more attractive; adolescents and adults both rate the faces of children younger than 4.6 years old as more appealing than those of older children; and body odors associated with fear quicken the visual processing of others’ facial expressions of fear.

[Findings]

Beak covering and nape-feather ruffling indicate calmness in sulfur-crested cockatoos.

[Findings]

Repetitive negative thinking was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and self-harm in female adolescents may prevent suicide.

[Findings]

Psychopaths recommend harsher punishments for homicides, whether accidental or motivated by profit, but exhibit relatively low concern about killing in general.

[Findings]

Online murder-for-hire advertisements seek to convey professionalism yet tend not to provide references up front.

[Findings]

Convalescent plasma helps Syrian hamsters fight SARS-CoV-2.

[Findings]

Plastic surgeons suggested that Botox could reduce the expression of negative emotions by masked faces.

[Findings]

The presence of a professional sports team increases a city’s seasonal flu deaths.

[Findings]

A psycholinguistic analysis of posts on Twitter and Weibo during COVID-19 lockdowns found that residents of Lombardy grew increasingly focused on leisure and residents of Wuhan grew increasingly focused on religion.

[Findings]

Recent toilet-­paper hoarding was more prevalent among Americans than Europeans and more prevalent among the old than the young.

[Findings]

Gerontologists cautioned that it would be difficult to predict individual Holocaust survivors’ trauma or resilience in response to the pandemic, which was expected to strengthen the market for laboratory mouse-suffocation chambers.

[Findings]

Researchers proposed replacing the paradigm of extinction with that of evanescence.

[Findings]

Climate change was expected to drive American lobsters to seek deeper waters, beavers to colonize new parts of Canada, and wolf spiders in the high Arctic to produce a second annual brood.

[Findings]

Humboldt penguins who nest in the open have more pollutant metabolites in their blood than do penguins who nest in guano-rich burrows.

[Findings]

The tiger snakes of Perth have heavy metals in their livers.

[Findings]

Satellite imagery captured ecosystem damage from fog loss, and aerial photography confirmed the existence of Roman military camps revealed by the 2018 Welsh drought.

[Findings]

A young woman in a Vilnius plague pit was found to have been coinfected with yaws.

[Findings]

A man buried at Newgrange passage tomb was found to be the product of first-degree incest, indicating that he was a member of the elite.

[Findings]

Scientists trained subjects to exercise control over a single neuron, linked the hippocampus to regret, and concluded that humans smell in stereo.

[Findings]

Straight Slovakians assume that a woman in high heels will inspire more intense mate-guarding.

[Findings]

Women who receive continuous rather than interrupted sutures for perineal repair after vaginal delivery report higher sexual levels of arousal and orgasmic function.

[Findings]

Pinkness predicts aggression in flamingos.

[Findings]

Chimpanzees have a bone in their hearts.

[Findings]

Rising population density, poor hygiene, and cold, moist weather led to a spike in ear infections in the Levant around 4000 bc, and postwar atmospheric nuclear testing led to increased cloud thickness and rainfall in the Shetland Islands.

[Findings]

A period of global coolness 4,200 years ago accelerated the diversification of japonica rice.

[Findings]

Ostrich-­shell beads indicating the onset of the Initial Upper Paleolithic were found to have reached Shuidonggou by 39000 bc, and strontium isotope levels revealed the social exchange of ostrich-­shell beads during the Late Quaternary in the Karoo Supergroup.

[Findings]

Interviews with reptile poachers in southwestern Balochistan indicated that the Caspian cobra, the desert monitor, the Iranian mastigure, Maynard’s longnose sand snake, the Persian spider gecko, and the Tartar sand boa were being captured for use by snake charmers.

[Findings]

Herpetologists inventoried the scars of snakes found in the Danube Gorge.

[Findings]

Half of Algeria’s marine turtle strandings are inexplicable.

[Findings]

Hemotoxic snakebite may be treatable with a heavy-­­metal chelator.

[Findings]

The mating calls of male Panama cross-­banded tree frogs are synchronized to confuse bats and midges.

[Findings]

Arson dogs’ noses remain better than lab equipment at detecting certain accelerants.

[Findings]

CBD improves quality of life in arthritic elderly dogs.

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