The door to the other world is always open, by Aaron Gilbert © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles
The rate of society’s moral decline is perceived similarly by both the young and the old, whereas moral decline measured through cooperation games shows steady improvement since the Fifties. Many human biases are the product of a small number of metabiases. Loneliness is idiosyncratic, solitary animals seem not to exhibit self-awareness, and workers who frequently interact with artificial intelligence have higher rates of insomnia and after-work drinking. Human hand scent is highly predictive of biological sex, and scientists in Japan identified the pheromone that calms rats’ fear. Pressure and temperature tests revealed that some larger dog breeds thought by veterinarians to be highly sensitive to pain are at most only moderately sensitive. Dementia in elderly dogs may be indicated by a slow gait, positive cultural beliefs about aging ameliorate mild cognitive impairment in the old, and Japanese centenarians have highly diverse gut viromes. Old men become more susceptible to cancer as they lose their Y chromosomes.
Rural Zambian infants utter more protophones around man-made objects than around natural ones both before and after the onset of canonical babbling. A woman without somatosensation was found to process sensory metaphors linguistically. Female bonobos’ ability to choose their mates, as well as their gregariousness and relative unlikeliness to affiliate with low-status males, diminishes male bonobos’ reproductive success as compared with that of chimpanzees. Large male Bornean orangutans can grumble and chomp at the same time, and female Sumatran orangutans can combine kiss-squeaks with rolling calls. Apex predators in Washington State are driving mesopredators into human-inhabited areas, where they are killed by humans. Deforestation encourages male Virginia hellbenders to eat their entire brood before they hatch. Matte iridescence camouflages beetles better than glossy iridescence. Placental mammals coexisted with dinosaurs. Both pregnant gray whales and lactating gray whales who feed off the Oregon Coast consume up to 21 million plastic microparticles per day. A species of octopus discovered in Okinawa in 2005 was found to experience wakeful brain activity during sleep, and animals can feel joy.
The degassing of Aleutian–Alaska Arc volcanoes releases roughly half the organic carbon collected on the seafloor as the Pacific plate returns to the mantle. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft successfully altered the orbit of Dimorphos, its target asteroid.* Planetary scientists created a map of Venus’s 85,000 volcanoes. Laser-ablation inductively coupled plasma quadrupole mass spectrometry can predict volcanic behavior. The production of lambda particles by semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering was observed. Groundwater extraction between 1993 and 2010 tilted Earth’s axis by 80 centimeters. The length of Earth’s day was 19.5 hours for more than a billion years. The radius of a proton varies depending on whether its charge or its mass is being measured. Previously unanalyzed papers belonging to Leonardo da Vinci modeled the gravitational constant with 97 percent accuracy. The Victorian grassland earless dragon was rediscovered.
