Aug 2, 2024 | Salon.com
Cancer rates are on the rise for younger generations, as a recent study in the journal Lancet Public Health demonstrates. For Generation X and Millennials, the rates for 17 different types of cancers have increased dramatically, with many cases linked to the rise in obesity rates.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) analyzed information from nearly 24 million patients diagnosed with 34 types of cancer (with over 7 million fatal cases) between Jan....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 1, 2024 | Salon.com
While COVID cases are going up in humans lately, animals have to worry about the virus too — and sick wildlife pose a threat to humans, because they can spread pathogens back and forth, giving them the opportunity to evolve new, more infectious mutations. A number of species can be infected with COVID-19, from deer and mink to dogs and rats....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 31, 2024 | Salon.com
When scientists study elephant communications, they often focus on females, and for seemingly good reason: Previous research had found that only females were socially integrated enough for individual members to engage in complex communication.
A new study in the journal PeerJ demolished that assumption, however, and in the process revealed to scientists that elephants in general are far more intelligent than previously believed....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 30, 2024 | Salon.com
When unsuspecting bats are infected with white-nose syndrome, they endure a slow and painful death. The fuzzy white fungus officially known as Pseudogymnoascus destructans covers their wings, tails and muzzles in a thick coat. When bats like the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) are afflicted with white-nose syndrome, they take too long to rise from torpor (prolonged hibernation) and struggle to stay nourished as the fungus consumes their bodies’ tiny fat deposits....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 29, 2024 | Salon.com
In a landmark systematic review of existing medical literature, researchers publishing in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs have found that previous research finding that moderate alcohol consumption had health benefits was badly flawed.
Conventional wisdom for the last several decades, based on earlier research, has held that drinking moderately — on the order of four or five alcoholic drinks a week for adults — has some health benefits and may even be associated with longer lifespans....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 28, 2024 | Salon.com
From their bizarre name to their blobby worm shape to the fact that its anus is also a mouth, sea cucumbers are some of the most outlandish things in the ocean. There are more than 1,700 species in the world, each one as otherworldly as the next, most shaped like the titular vegetable (a cucumber), albeit covered in leathery skin and with featuring strange branch-like appendages....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 27, 2024 | Salon.com
When people talk to each other, their conversations usually include many fast twists. Humans do not naturally talk in Shakespearean soliloquies, but by regularly interrupting and wildly gesticulating. The conventional wisdom is that our chats will take major turns roughly every 200 milliseconds — and new research in the journal Current Biology reveals that chimpanzees do the same thing....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 26, 2024 | Salon.com
President Biden’s administration announced on Friday they wish to invest $575 million in projects to help coastal communities adapt to climate change.
The proposal, which would fall under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate-Ready Coasts initiative, would fund 19 projects along the seaboard and Great Lakes regions. Overall the investments would cover 15 states, as well as the U.S....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 26, 2024 | Elections, Salon.com
With President Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has become his heir apparent and the near-certain Democratic nominee. Most climate scientists and activists expect that a potential Harris administration would continue Biden’s climate policies. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, however, is very much up for debate....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 26, 2024 | Salon.com
Former president Donald Trump and German Führer Adolf Hitler share many qualities: A far right ideology, a mythos centered around a Big Lie, a predilection for theatrics. Until July 13, 2024, however, only Hitler had nourished his cult of personality around assassination attempts.
From a drunken brawl in 1921 (back when Hitler was just a Nazi Party speaker and long before he rose to national power) and an ordinary citizen’s pistol in 1939 to multiple official bombing conspiracies, Hitler survived so many attempts on his life that his followers claimed he was protected by a higher power....
Originally posted on salon.com