“Effusion,” “Fluxitecture,” “Haven,” and “Heart(h),” photographs by David Garland, whose work is on view this month at Headstone Gallery, in Kingston, New York © The artist. Courtesy Headstone Gallery, Kingston, New York
Luminescent grains from the Erg Chebbi sand sea dated the origin of the Lala Lallia star dune to 11000 bc. The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy denied the Anthropocene epoch status by a vote of twelve to four, though a paleontologist and a stratigrapher moved to void the decision on procedural grounds. Scientists determined that the retreat of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier began in the Forties, making it synchronous with the retreat of Pine Island Glacier, and meltwater from the Yukon glaciers Donjek, Dusty, and Kluane, once assumed to contain very little methane, was found to contain very high concentrations of the gas. Scientists predicted that the Atlantic would start contracting within twenty million years, and that the oceans change too slowly to be significantly helped by stratospheric aerosol injection. The planetary freshwater system was destabilized by the middle of the twentieth century. An orca acting alone killed a great white shark and ate its liver. Over the course of a year, Indian elephants in the eastern Himalayan floodplains buried five dead calves upside down in irrigation ditches on tea plantations.
A metal scar on the surface of the white dwarf WD 0816-310 indicated that it has cannibalized other bodies in its orbit. Violence and novel pathogens were presumed to be the mechanisms whereby farmers associated with the Funnel Beaker culture wiped out the Ertebølle culture hunter-gatherers of Scandinavia 5,900 years ago (as well as those whereby the big-boned cattle herders associated with the Single Grave culture, in turn, wiped out Funnel Beaker farmers 4,700 years ago). The incidence of Down syndrome rose in early Iron Age Spain. Machine analysis of contemporaneous documents tracked the 1840s potato blight as it moved through the Northeastern United States prior to its outbreak in Ireland. Seventy coins were extracted from a thirty-six-year-old white Nebraska alligator named Thibodaux. Higher soil levels of copper and selenium result in Greenlandic musk oxen having more calves, and giant Antarctic sea spider parents attach their eggs to rocky sea bottoms rather than carry them until they hatch. In a survey conducted by the BBC, it was shown that all reporting supermarket chains stocked chickens burned by their own feces while alive, and a green power plant in North Yorkshire that provides 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s electricity was accused of burning rare trees.
Scientists following the morning love songs of Skywalker hoolock gibbons found significant numbers of them in areas of Myanmar previously thought to be home exclusively to Eastern hoolock gibbons. Low vocal pitch among men strikes people as more formidable and prestigious in societies with higher homicide rates. Recent Antarctic overwinterers were found to have developed their own accent. The words “easy,” “relax,” and “xaler” slow a sleeper’s heart, whereas the words “produce,” “materials,” and “slairetam” do not. Words and images with positive or negative emotional valences make it more difficult for people with aphasia to find other, unrelated words. Elderly Chinese people are less likely than young Britons to interpret facial emojis according to their canonical meaning. Researchers discovered that, when asked to deliver verdicts on criminal trials, GPT-4 is more likely to recommend a death sentence for defendants who speak African-American English. The north of England is losing its strong r’s.
