Conservative voters value deep voices and square jaws, whereas liberal voters prefer feminine faces. Government instability leads both white and black Americans to favor light-skinned politicians. Dying black people may prefer heroic lifesaving measures over palliative care because of doctors’ relatively colder body language toward them. Female subjects spend less time hugging virtual fat men than virtual fat women. Women with desirable male mates avoid interactions with women who are ovulating. Women who were on hormonal birth control when they met their male partners exhibit greater desire for those partners during pregnancy. Embryos for I.V.F. may be grown in a vagina. The presence or lack of erotic audiovisuals was associated with differing patterns of spinal-cord arousal in women who stimulated themselves with custom MRI-compatible vibrators. The hot hand may not be a fallacy.
Concerns about plagiarism led Romania to announce that it would stop offering thirty-day sentence reductions for each scientific paper a prisoner wrote. U.S. prisons are compromised by guard presenteeism. The insurgency phase of the Iraq War increased rates of PTSD in American servicemen but not in servicewomen. Neurosurgeons using the Glasgow Outcome Scale at the Elvis Presley Memorial Trauma Center evaluated the validity of the St. Louis Scale for Pediatric Gunshot Wounds to the Head. A researcher at the University of Maryland found that “high-school football players, regardless of concussions, who drank Fifth Quarter Fresh chocolate milk during the season showed positive results overall.” Forensic scientists advised biological anthropologists on the study of ancient child abuse. Chimpanzees will tug ropes to collapse the food tables of other chimps only to punish grave social infractions, but capuchins will sabotage others merely for having more food than they do. Materialistic consumers with poor human relationships prefer anthropomorphic “servant” brands over which they can exert control. The Sport Shopper thrives on a sense of mastery.
The falcons of Mogador may pluck the flight and tail feathers of small birds and imprison them in crevasses for later consumption. Australian biologists trained monitor lizards not to eat cane toads. Fish flavoring may cause feline hyperthyroidism. An Idaho mountain lion that was shot was discovered to have teeth on the back of its head. A snake that was run over on a Kyrgyz road is a new species of pit viper. Style guides have endangered the relative pronoun “which.” India sought lentil self-sufficiency. Caterpillars zombified by parasitoid wasps eat more carbs. Medication allowed a seventy-three-year-old man with a history of extravagance, hoarding, and promiscuity to stop believing that “the personality or psychic core of his cat had been replaced.” A woman with multiple personalities was cured of her blindness in some personalities but not in others. Those with attachment anxiety experience more phantom phone rings. Washington, D.C., was found to be an extreme outlier for its high rate of firearm-homicide deaths, Maryland for deaths by syphilis, and Rhode Island for deaths by events of undetermined intent.
“Tumbleweed (Silverbell Road),” “Tumbleweed (Twin Peaks Road),” and “Tumbleweed (Sandario Road),” hand-tinted photographs by Kate Breakey. Courtesy the artist, Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Austin, Texas; Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona; and Littlejohn Contemporary, New York City
