Mating Season, a painting by Sophie Milner © The artist
California ground squirrels are carnivorous. Monkeys are faster at spotting a snake among salamanders than a salamander among snakes. Dogs are better than humans at spotting spotted-lanternfly egg masses in forests, but humans are better than dogs at doing so in vineyards. Mollusks discovered in the Silurian Herefordshire Lagerstätte were named Punk ferox and Emo vorticaudum. Harbor seal mothers prefer to rest on slower icebergs after giving birth and on faster ones during molting season. It remained unclear where the two orcas resident at Marineland Antibes, who under French law must stop performing by the end of next year, would live thereafter, since the government determined that a Japanese zoo was governed by insufficiently strong animal-welfare laws, a Canarian park might still require them to perform tricks, and a Canadian bay would have to be enclosed and the whales monitored by veterinarians until they die. Six dead dolphins who washed up in Texas were found to have fentanyl in their blubber. A new crocodile newt that breeds in Hunanese rice paddies, Tylototriton gaowangjienensis, was described. Excessive tearfulness in the right eye of a fifty-five-year-old Japanese woman was traced to a supernumerary punctum.
A meta-analysis of inequity aversion among blue-headed macaws, blue-throated macaws, bonobos, capuchins, chimpanzees, crows, Goffin’s cockatoos, gorillas, great green macaws, gray parrots, keas, long-tailed macaques, marmosets, orangutans, owl monkeys, ravens, squirrel monkeys, and rhesus macaques found no evidence that the animals experience envy, though they do in some cases feel disappointment. Chinese university students in positions of advantageous inequity experience more empathy and guilt than they do anger, delight, or shame. Paranoid people shown a group of dots are prone to hallucinate one chasing another. Americans with college degrees are more than twice as likely as high school graduates to have recently used ketamine, which induces zebra fish to keep going rather than give up when they aren’t getting anywhere. Damage to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex impairs one’s understanding of when it makes sense to keep waiting. Patience is a mechanism to regulate impatience, multilingualism predicts less severe autism, sleep deprivation makes it harder to suppress unpleasant memories, head injuries may awaken dormant viruses in the brain, and medication may treat those who suffer from disorders that make them smooth-brained.
Ice-core records suggest that lead poisoning in the Roman Empire lowered IQs by two to three points. Estimates of the social cost of carbon emissions are likely too low by half. An AI analysis of multiple climate models predicted that, by 2060, Europe, most of Asia, most of Africa, and most of the Americas will have warmed at least three degrees Celsius beyond the preindustrial baseline. Warming in the Sierra Nevada was expected to decrease snow cover but kill bighorn sheep in avalanches at consistent or increased rates. Soccer has been getting faster. Decision-making power in the mission to transport Mars’s rocks to Earth devolved to Donald Trump. Scientists urged the abandonment of attempts to create mirror life, against which existing life-forms may possess no defenses. Physicists detected negative time. Humans prefer prospection to retrospection. Archaeologists speculated that, in the largest known Bronze Age massacre in Britain, attackers killed, butchered, and ate men, women, and children as a political statement.
