Photographs by Albarrán Cabrera, from The World’s First Photobook Was Blue, which was published last year by Ira Stehmann, IBASHO, and the(M) éditions. The artists’ work will be on view in May at AIPAD, in New York City © The artists
A global study of 1,554 regions from 1979 to 2019 found that heavy rainfall dampens economic growth. The rings of trees used in European buildings between 1250 and 1699 closely track prosperity and crisis, with the number of felled trees falling during periods of economic decline. Medieval warhorses were the size of modern ponies, and wild ass–donkey hybrids used for travel and war in Mesopotamia were presumed to be the prized kungas of Ur. Funerary avenues lined with wedge-tailed pendants and infilled ringed cairns, which are among the drystone Holocene monuments known to the Bedouin as “the works of the old men,” emanate from the Khaybar Oasis. In the Negev, where archaeologists studying a sixth-century Byzantine church noticed a curly-haired long-nosed beardless Jesus, scientists taught goldfish to drive their tanks on land. The expansion of the Local Bubble, a thousand-light-year-wide star-covered void with Earth at its center, was caused by supernovas. Further support was offered for the fuzzball theory of black holes, and the Schwinger Effect was mimicked in the absence of a cosmic event.
Researchers speculated that the substantially higher use of erectile-dysfunction medication among feminist Canadian men may be due to nonfeminist men’s underreporting of usage or fear of accessing health care, or to feminist men’s greater desire to please their female partners or reclaim, through better erections, any masculinity forfeited through their feminism. Religiosity was found to be lower in sexually equitable countries, though the decline was more pronounced in men than women. Epigenetic changes were recorded among pregnant Tutsi women who witnessed the Rwandan genocide and their unborn fetuses. Thale-cress mutations are not random. The embryonic stem cells of frogs migrate to create the hardness of frog faces. A pharmacologically administered liver enzyme was found to halve ethanol consumption among alcoholic vervet monkeys, macaques in Virginia failed to wean themselves off heroin and cocaine, and a new population of whitehanded gibbons was discovered in Malaysia.
Even dim light before bedtime suppresses melatonin production in preschoolers. American teens who get too little sleep consume an additional 4.5 pounds of sugar per year, and Zurich teens who were allowed to sleep in during the pandemic reported better health and well-being. The heads of juvenile pheasants cool down in preparation for a fight, then heat up again. New Caledonian crows store complex tools for later use. Mumbai’s mayor mocked the penguin-viewing facility of Ahmedabad. Indian researchers developed a frostbite-prevention cream, Japanese researchers developed a nasal spray to treat dementia, and a team at MIT developed an mRNA vaccine pill. Engineers and molecular geneticists built a web server that can analyze noncoding RNA’s raw CLASH data, and scientists described the cognitive repulsion mechanism that causes people to get lost in supermarkets. An analysis of three decades of Spanish punk lyrics established that “madness” connotes pathology as well as loss of control and opposition to reason, and Finnish hospital admissions reflect lower mortality rates and less self-harm and alcoholism in areas with high numbers of heavy metal bands per capita. A ranking of eighty-one countries found the United Kingdom to be the best place to die.
