Embroidered photographs by Julie Cockburn from the Ta Da series © The artist. Courtesy The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Verbal autopsy revealed many Bangladeshis have been attacked by rabid mongooses, and intergroup violence among wild banded mongooses was found to be initiated by females, who enjoy mating with extragroup males “in the midst of battle,” with the costs of fighting borne chiefly by intragroup males, a dynamic that suggests mammalian aggression occurs more readily when those who incite conflict do not suffer severe consequences. An eight-year study of wound patterns found Javan slow lorises’ use of venom not to be gendered. Researchers confirmed that the African crested rat obtains its poison by licking the bark of a poisonous tree. Male wrinkle-faced bats lower their skin-fold masks during sex. COVID-19 lockdowns have led to increased jaw-clenching in Israel. Marine biologists in the Rowley Shoals caught an eighty-one-year-old midnight snapper, and oceanographers in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone who baited 115 cutthroat eels atop a seamount recorded the largest-ever aggregation of abyssal fishes.
Scientists were looking into intermittent artificial gravity as a countermeasure to the effects of space flight on astronauts’ eyes, warned of a coming shortage of moon resources, and narrowed the provenance of the altar stone at Stonehenge. Climate change was lately revealing Bronze Age arrows, and mastodons were found depicted in Ice Age rock art in the Colombian Amazon. A river one thousand kilometers long may be running underneath the Greenland ice sheet, whose moulins are larger than previously thought. The Medieval Climate Anomaly warmed Victoria Land but cooled the Ross Ice Shelf. Reducing aerosol pollution without reducing CO2 levels will still increase atmospheric warming, which is leading to more wintertime drownings and may cause the Brahmaputra River to flood disastrously. Prehistoric climate change caused Brachymeles lizards to lose their legs, then to evolve them once more. The temperature of gas in the universe has increased tenfold over the past ten billion years, to an average of about two million degrees Kelvin. Tree rings may contain supernova traces.
Keyhole wasps were preventing Australian planes from measuring airspeed, and Canadian petroleum extraction was increasing the fragility of river otters’ penis bones. Two elderly warmblood mares were found to have different forms of squamous cell carcinoma in their perinea and left labia. Indonesian urologists reported successful replantation of a penis following proximal self-amputation of the shaft. Antipsychotics are most often to blame for drug-induced priapism. Pessimism predicts bipolar relapse. Former NFL players do not exhibit particularly diminished cognition. Maternal prenatal stress accelerates the biological aging of offspring, and women who feel “overwhelmed and unable to cope” before pregnancy have shorter gestation. Navajo children tend to streamline complex verb inflections. A French bioengineering team created an organoid that mimics the embryonic murine heart. Turkish midwifery researchers found that women’s perception of the benefits of an early cervical cancer diagnosis is negatively correlated with shyness. Delightful Emotional Index scores increased for Japanese dementia patients whom an actor regaled with stories.
