Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who enter the top 1 percent of earners are less likely to remain there if they are not white. Individualism in the United States was correlated with the rise of white-collar jobs. Hedge-fund managers who look trustworthy attract more clients than managers who look undependable, but the latter generate larger returns. Brides in 1930s Connecticut who were judged agreeable and emotionally stable by their bridesmaids lived longer. U.S. counties in which residents more frequently tweet “bitches,” “haters,” “jealous,” “drama,” “cunt,” “grrr,” “sooo,” “fucked,” and “Mondays” have more heart-disease deaths. The blindfolded lead the nonblindfolded in estimating the severity of everyday impairment caused by blindness. The legs of adult British Columbians cramp in the night twice as often during the summer. Swiss prison guards report contentedness. New Zealanders in a doctor’s office are fourteen times more likely to steal gossipy magazines than serious ones. Dutch chimpanzees who moved to Edinburgh now grunt like locals. Wolf society, not human domestication, gave dogs their social skills.
High school girls who underwent virtual-reality assertiveness training reported less sexual victimization, and college men who took online sexual-violence-awareness tutorials reported committing less rape. Old banned chemicals may be weakening polar bears’ penile bones. Sugary-drink consumption correlates with early menarche. Teen pregnancy rose by 30 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Iraq. Caesarean delivery, vacuum-assisted delivery, maternal fatigue, and violent partners were associated with pain in postpartum vaginal intercourse. Labor augmentation does not cause autism, but Romanian orphanages may. Dutch babies laugh, smile, and cuddle more than American babies. An Arizona toddler mistakenly given scorpion antivenin for methamphetamine poisoning exhibited immediate improvement. Targeted social rejection worsens asthma in popular adolescents. Teen boys who wrongly think themselves fat often grow up to be fat. A woman who received a fecal transplant from her obese sixteen-year-old daughter rapidly became obese herself. Repeated blows to the head were linked to cognitive impairment.
Camponotus fellah ants who become isolated from others walk around continuously, fail to digest their food, and have one tenth the life span of social ants. Round morphs of aphids produce honeydew for their ant hosts, but flat morphs impersonate ant larvae in order to be carried into nests, where they suck the larval hemolymph. Scientists worry that Colorado rabbitbrush will suffer if bears eat more trash and fewer ants. A green sea slug that feeds on sunlight likely took its photosynthesizing genes from the algae it eats. An explosion of pink sea slugs in California may predict a strong El Niño. Some cone snails both poison fish and give them insulin comas. An Indo-American team of investigators implicated the lychee harvest in the annually occurring mystery brain illness of Muzaffarpur. Chemists unboiled an egg. Glass eventually becomes solid. Geophysicists measured the rate at which the solid ice of Ceres melts into air. Extreme mantle perturbation was discovered in the Qinling–Dabie–Sulu orogenic belt. Undersea volcanoes erupt almost always between January and June. Geologists confirmed that the principal driver of change on earth since 1950 has been human economic activity. The sulfur bacteria of Western Australia have not evolved in 2.3 billion years. The British government granted an unplanned beaver family on the River Otter leave to remain.
Photographs by Vincent Delbrouck, from Some Windy Trees, published by Wilderness. Courtesy the artist and Stieglitz 19, Antwerp
