Photographs by Brenda Biondo, whose work is on view through September with the Center for Fine Art Photography at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. Courtesy the artist
A study in The Laryngoscope found that six of seven singing injuries could be treated conservatively by singing speech pathologists. Users of American Sign Language make obscurer signs closer to the face. Sleep consolidates positive emotions and suppresses negative ones. Late-onset alcoholism may be a symptom of dementia. Gut microbiomes indicate when football players have recovered from a concussion, concussions and traumatic brain injuries can occur among musk oxen and bighorn sheep, and macaques conceived during the 2018 California wildfires have worse memories and are more passive. Researchers identified the spike-protein change that allows canine coronavirus to jump to humans. Canine cognitive dysfunction syndrome may be a useful model for Alzheimer’s, and the subdued, monotonous speech affect of Parkinson’s can be replicated in zebra finches. A metastudy of psychedelic lizard ingestion failed to identify any female users, and light-sensing neurons were revived in the eyes of the dead.
Earth plants were successfully cultivated in moon soil. Dry-wood termites have made at least forty ocean crossings in the past fifty million years, and the black rat colonized Europe twice. A silver Roman penis pendant unearthed by a retiree was ruled to be treasure, then assessed by the coroner of Maidstone for its “foreskin, shaft, and pubes.” The consumption of improperly cooked cow entrails during winter feasts was responsible for the intestinal parasites of those who built Stonehenge. A six-year-old on Bawdsey Beach found the tooth of a megalodon, which were found to have gone extinct partly because of competition with great white sharks. Bottlenose dolphins in the northern Egyptian Red Sea rub against mucus-secreting gorgonian coral polyps to self-medicate, and Indonesian blood python harvesting is unsustainable. Playing the sound of jackdaws reaching a consensus to leave their roosts makes other jackdaws leave their roosts, on average, six minutes faster. Whereas female Eurasian penduline tits bury their eggs in order to abandon their mates and start a second family, Chinese penduline tit couples bury their eggs collaboratively to keep them secure in strong winds. Wild horses can distinguish between positive and negative human sounds.
Finnish laser scans revealed the reason tree branches droop at night. The Corn Belt is on track to become unsuitable for corn cultivation by 2100, and the level of aflatoxins in corn is set to increase. Micromodeling has allowed for the representation of eddies in shallow cloud systems. British ecologists recommended the establishment of moth highways to ease the transition of species driven northward by warming, and the northward movement of the pine beauty moth was fifty years ahead of existing estimates. Scientists were studying a selection of sites that included the Flinders Reef and the San Francisco Bay to define the golden spike of the Anthropocene. Fjords are emitting as much methane as the deep ocean. The ocean is losing its memory. Massive quantities of nanoplastics are distributed in sea spray and fog. Atmospheric levels of helium-4 are rising. River avulsions can be predicted. There may be a mirror universe of particles that interacts with our universe through gravity alone.
