The lover and the beloved, by Jesse Mockrin, whose exhibition The Venus Effect was on view in October at James Cohan Gallery, in New York City © The artist. Courtesy the artist; James Cohan, New York City; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles
Astronomers discovered a large planet that orbits an improbably small star every 3.7 days. A hyperbolic meteor from the Oort Cloud that may have undergone gravitational perturbation in its passage through Scholz’s binary star system eighty thousand years ago was detected by the Finnish Fireball Network, and many comets from the cloud were found farther than expected from the sun. Microplastics were observed in the mountain clouds of eastern China. The application of a magnetic torque can allow sand to flow uphill. Dolomite was finally grown in near-ambient conditions, and the domestication of psychedelic mushrooms has severely constrained their genetic diversity. Scientists proposed using groundwater warmed by cars in underground parking garages in Berlin to heat homes in the winter. In Los Angeles, where average land surface temperatures have risen by 8.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the past thirty-six years, the effect of income on mediating urban temperature and greenness is becoming significantly weaker. Researchers analyzed evidence of Middle Jurassic paleo-wildfires in a coal seam in a paleomire in the Ordos Basin. The exploitation of beavers four hundred thousand years ago was studied by a team analyzing remains recovered during thirty-three years of excavations at Bilzingsleben by Dietrich Mania.
True crabs independently evolved to live out of the ocean up to seventeen times. Snakelocks anemones were found to be the first known heliotropic animals. An increase of antimony, cobalt, and lead in the ocean is helping to skew sea turtle populations female. Killifish enter a state of perpetual fasting when they grow old. Nesting chinstrap penguins experience more than ten thousand microsleeps a day, each lasting an average of four seconds. African penguins identify their mates by the spots on their chests, and the chest hair of dancing street monkeys in Islamabad reflects higher cortisol and lower testosterone levels than those of monkeys living in a primatological facility in Florida. Megamouth sharks are ovoviviparous. Hormonal birth control makes adolescent rats more impulsive, bumblebees cannot taste pesticides, and male serotine bats who mated in the attic of a Dutch church were found to have enormous penises that they used not for penetration but for manipulation.
Prenatal and neonatal nitrogen dioxide exposure was associated with a narrower penis at one year of age. American boys between the ages of four and eleven are twice as likely as those between twelve and seventeen to have practiced yoga in the past year. Female Anopheles darlingi mosquitoes who are inseminated but unfed, virgin but blood-fed, or inseminated and blood-fed exhibit lower locomotor activity than unfed virgins. The same man was found to have given five middle-aged white women in southwest Michigan ocular syphilis. Indonesian women in arranged marriages give birth to fewer live babies. Male psychopaths have more children. Half of all beef consumed in the United States is eaten by 12 percent of adults, in particular men aged fifty to sixty-five. A fifth of the genomes detected in the gut microbiome of the Hadza were unlisted in the Unified Human Gastrointestinal Genome, and descriptions of the world given by the Hadza are less mediated by internal mental states and subjective feelings than those given by North Carolinians. Working-class and poor Jews were found to be underrepresented in American popular culture. Researchers at Kyushu University unveiled a Hikikomori Diagnostic Evaluation tool. While many reproductive-age adults with climate anxiety generally report an intention to have fewer children, some say it inspires them to have more.
