“RYB,” a photograph by Robin Rhode © The artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg
The Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the black-faced honeycreeper, and the cryptic treehunter were declared extinct. A goose and a gull overdosed on opioids, and a drug-sniffing dog overdosed on ecstasy. Drones can detect nightjars’ nests. Five hundred and seventeen maize weevils were found embedded in a Japanese pot from the late Jomon Period, and 527 millipedes were found trapped in Burmese amber from the Cretaceous. The Deep Carbon Observatory estimated that the carbon mass of organisms in Earth’s deep biosphere is at least 245 times that of humankind. The association of poverty with obesity among Americans arose in the past thirty years. Scientists proposed that the start of the Anthropocene be marked by the emergence of the broiler chicken. The climate may, within the next 130 years, warm to levels last seen 50 million years ago. Oceans are warming 40 percent faster than five-year-old estimates predicted. There has not, in fact, been a “pause” in recent warming, though carbon output may be slowed by the addition of soldier-fly larvae to dog food and of seaweed to cattle feed. China landed a probe on the dark side of the moon, and Uranus probably lies on its side because it was hit by a rock.
Female bark lice evolved penises twice. Parental exposure to nonstick pans may shorten boys’ penises. Proper brushing may prevent erectile dysfunction. Plants do not, in fact, like it when people touch them. The pain tolerance of a subject whose hand is submerged in ice water is not improved if he or she gives the bucket the middle finger. Sadists, in the end, hurt themselves. Both neural structure and neural connectivity are markedly different in callous Dutch ten-year-olds. Of the “dark triad” traits, only narcissism can be seen in the face. White people have a harder time telling real from fake smiles among black people, possibly because white people avoid making eye contact with black people. Many three-year-olds think angry dogs are happy. Marmosets track melodies, and pilot whales have group dialects. Rising levels of oceanic carbon may inhibit salmon’s ability to smell. People with bilateral calcification of the basolateral amygdala due to Urbach–Wiethe disease have nicer dreams. Moral judgments deriving from disgust are inhibited by the consumption of ginger. Jews popularized the fingered citron throughout the Mediterranean. Researchers suggested measures whereby financial traders in Israel may counteract their consistently lower returns, perhaps resulting from increased honesty, during the High Holidays. A man found that a virus into which he had genetically encoded passages from Genesis caused mild inflammation when injected into his thigh, but that a peptide into which he had encoded passages from the Koran did not.
People forced to be honest for three days generally had a good time, the average user would require $1,000 to go without Facebook for a year, and people imagine luck to be a zero-sum game. Disney princesses are curvier than villainesses. Both women and men require kindness in a theoretical booty call, and women feel threatened by the prospect of their male partners copulating with gynoid robots. Among Canadian women, theists are more fertile than atheists, and American men and women who are politically extreme have more children. Exposure to markets causes left-leaning people to shift their beliefs rightward, and people with higher social status are more supportive of redistributive economic plans. People who consider themselves physically formidable tend to be conservative. Humans with vertical pupils are perceived as threatening. Large numbers of demented gun owners experience delusions and hallucinations. End-of-life nurses reported that a Lack of Acceptance/Readiness occurs among patients at a marginally higher rate than Acceptance/Readiness. The distance a German serial killer travels to kill people is not affected by whether or not he disposes of the bodies.
