Car in Woods, a painting by Jordan West, whose work is on view this month as part of the exhibition Where Earth Meets Sky, at KÖNIG GALERIE, in Munich. Courtesy the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE
Climate change, which researchers warned may have a catastrophic effect on butterflies, is causing despair among the adolescents of southern Madagascar, and the warming of the atmosphere is thinning the thermosphere, reducing its capacity to burn up space junk and the carrying capacity for satellites in low Earth orbit. The disappearance of an estimated 2,891 gigatons of terrestrial soil moisture between 2000 and 2016 accounted for about 7.1 millimeters of the sea-level rise observed in that period. Cratonic thinning under North America may be driven by the Farallon slab. Hydroacoustic imaging revealed otter-trawl damage to the floors of the Kiel and Mecklenburg Bights and mussel-dredge damage to the floor of the Flensburg Fjord. Researchers created shear and compressional seabed geoacoustic profiles at the New England Mud Patch. Martian dust may threaten astronauts’ health. “This isn’t,” admitted the lead author of the study, “the most dangerous part about going to Mars.”
The Japan Endocrine Society turned one hundred, and the Bone Research Society turned seventy-five. Dismembered skeletons in a pit at Bayanbulak, possibly the site Emperor Wu of Han’s chief historian termed the Fortification for Receiving Surrender, were likely farmers from northern China conscripted during the Han–Xiongnu Wars. Early Bronze Age burials in the Upper Tigris may have accorded special favor to dead adolescents, whereas after the emergence of social hierarchy burial privilege shifted to dead elites; the involvement of children in prehistoric cave painting was likely due to their status as “liminal beings”; and the first antique instance of cinnabar-stained teeth was documented in a Subeshi woman in Grave M11 at Shengjindian Cemetery. Paleopathologists determined that a three- or four-year-old boy was likely given a fatal dose of mercury as treatment for rickets in nineteenth-century Rouen. Greco-Roman sculpture was perfumed.
Preventable deaths rose between 2009 and 2021 in the United States, most of all in West Virginia and least of all in Massachusetts, and since the Aughts the rate of marathoners’ fatal heart attacks has fallen by half. All four subclades of monkeypox have achieved sustained human-to-human transmission. Robot elephants are becoming increasingly popular at Indian temples. Dogs act more jealous when their owners interact with robots than when they read magazines. Pets increase Britons’ life satisfaction by three to four points on a scale of seven. The foreheads of teddy bears grew significantly taller between 1900 and 1980, though the bears did not become appreciably cuter over the same period. Across racial categories women’s eyelash length is perceived as increasingly healthy up to one third of the width of the eye, past which further elongation becomes perceived as less healthy but increasingly indicative of sexual receptivity. Adult red-cheeked cordon bleus and star finches of both sexes prefer to hold longer strings in their beaks for mating displays. Male blue-lined octopuses inject poison into the aortas of their female partners at the start of copulation, likely to avoid being eaten afterward. Male fruit flies seek out alcohol because it makes them more attractive to female flies and more successful at mating, not, as was previously theorized, because they are depressed about not yet having mated. Attachment avoidance negatively correlates with love addiction. AI use is correlated with narcissism and psychopathy.
