All the Living Things IV, Sunflowers, and Sun and Birds, mixed-media artworks by Emma Larsson, whose work is on view at Simard Bilodeau Contemporary, in Los Angeles © The artist. Courtesy Simard Bilodeau Contemporary, Los Angeles
Researchers who observed eight-to-twelve-year-olds in Florida found that, in contrast to the established tendency of children to gain popularity through prosocial behavior, some become popular through the threat of aggressive, disruptive behavior. Hypertensive men overestimate anger in faces. Angry voices and faces are likelier to be viewed as male, and happy ones to be viewed as female. The feline parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be sexually transmitted among humans, may cause women to exhibit lower levels of facial asymmetry and body mass, higher levels of self-perceived attractiveness, a higher number of sexual partners, and may cause both infected men and women alike to be rated as more attractive. Neither liberals nor conservatives see wider faces as giving women a dominant aura. Political partisans not only choose which news sources to consume but also anticipate when following the news at all will be congenial to their beliefs. AI language analysis determined that people are more male than female.
The DNA of brisk-walking Britons is sixteen years younger at midlife, and the pelvises of Britons in the Roman and late medieval periods had the most worms. A feast hosted by peasants for their rulers during the reign of King Ine of Wessex provided approximately 4,140 calories per guest in the form of rolls, cheese, ale, honey, beef, poultry, mutton, salmon, and eel. Archaeologists tracked the gaze of visitors touring a virtual re-creation of the House of Greek Epigrams, and a robot dog searched for tomb raiders’ tunnels in Pompeii. A hydroxyl megamaser was observed five billion light-years from Earth, researchers modeled the electrostatic self-organization of zwitterionic nanoparticles, and engineers found that the failure stress of Oreo filling is roughly equal to that of mozzarella. The global camel milk market was growing steadily. Atmospheres in the western United States are getting thirstier. The shattering of ice droplets into shards in clouds over the Southern Ocean allows more solar energy to reach the planet’s surface. Io may be a dune world. During nuclear winter, wild foods surviving in tropical forests will include baobab trees, mopane worms, and palm weevils.
The Unconventional Computing Laboratory found that the electrical impulses of mushrooms appear to communicate using vocabularies of up to fifty words, and that split gills form more complex sentence patterns than caterpillar, enoki, and ghost mushrooms. Psychedelic experiences increase the share of people who attribute consciousness to fungi from 21 percent to 56 percent. Psilocybin frees depressives from rumination. Amygdala changes suggest that there are anxieties specific to autism. Americans with Down syndrome have lower rates of cocaine use and ADHD, and some ADHD diagnoses might be more accurately classified as maladaptive daydreaming. Pupillary dilation in response to imagined visual phenomena is pronounced in those with vivid imaginations and suppressed in those with aphantasia. Japanese researchers divided humans into sixteen sleep phenotypes. Fetal shoulder growth slows just before birth to ease delivery. The short arms of T. rexes may have evolved to avoid bites from conspecifics during feeding frenzies. Squid, like octopuses and cuttlefish, camouflage to match their substrates. Marine biologists speculated that the whup and grumble sounds of humpback whales at Vema Seamount may indicate the location’s importance to the whales, who were also observed making previously unheard gunshot sounds. Cichlids can perform simple arithmetic. Bike-sharing in New York City seems to be a Poisson process.
