Apr 4, 2024 | Salon.com
Humans owe our impressive intellect to our large brains, which are unusually sophisticated thanks to evolution. The first surge in our brain size occurred between 2 million and 800,000 years ago, when our species’ increase in territory and physical size caused our brains to literally grow. As the climate changed between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, human brains became even more complex so people could adapt to their new environments....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 3, 2024 | Salon.com
Four years after the COVID pandemic first began, public attention has turned to another virus: highly pathogenic avian influenza A (also known as H5N1), which has been the center of a rash of outbreaks across dairy farms in the U.S. Even more worryingly, a few humans have also gotten sick.
But wait, isn’t this a pathogen that only infects birds?...
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 2, 2024 | Salon.com
When the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted “The Starry Night” in 1889, he did so while staring out a window from his mental asylum room in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. More than a century later, a team of scientists discovered a yellow-and-blue patterned lizard and were reminded of the same visual scene that once inspired one of history’s most renowned painters....
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 2, 2024 | Salon.com
When a pair of climate change-deniers spread lies about climate scientist Michael Mann, he sued his attackers and actually won, after a jury awarded him a $1 million settlement in February.
When the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Rand Simberg and the National Review’s Mark Steyn wrote a pair of blog posts about Mann in 2012, they made two defamatory claims: First they falsely accused Mann of manipulating data in his famous “hockey stick graph” depicting the rapid increase in Earth’s temperature due to burning fossil fuels, and then they baselessly compared Mann to notorious child molester Jerry Sandusky, writing that he “molested and tortured data” and was “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Apr 2, 2024 | Salon.com
Birds never cease to amaze observers with their versatile intelligence. Flying birds experience time and space in radically different ways than humans; urban birds like pigeons adapted with remarkable ease to the COVID-19 pandemic; and even the supposedly stupid turkeys can survive in a wide range of habitats and endlessly frustrate hunters with their cleverness....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 31, 2024 | Salon.com
The Colorado River is a 1,450-mile-behemoth, its raging waters carving their way through seven U.S. and two Mexican states. It is arguably the central attraction of the Grand Canyon, one of the world’s most famous natural wonders. But it does more than look beautiful — some forty million people depend on the river for their water and hydroelectric power, not to mention the fish and wildlife who also share it with us....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 29, 2024 | Democrats, Salon.com
I remember exactly when Joe Lieberman became my friend — after he scolded me for not heeding the commands of my Jewish mother.
In 2017, I was working on a series of articles for Salon about “centrism,” a once-dominant but rapidly fading force in American political life. That May I had interviewed two of the most most prominent remaining centrists, both of whom had to some degree become outcasts from their own political parties....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 28, 2024 | Salon.com
When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos from in vitro fertilization procedures are “extrauterine children,” the right-wing jurists controversially put a halt to IVF procedures all over the state. But one thing that may have been overlooked in the debate is how we could rely more on these technologies to have children in the future, thanks to both climate change and the proliferation of toxins in the environment....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 26, 2024 | Salon.com
A recently-discovered amphibian ancestor has been named after Kermit the Frog, the ballad-crooning, pig-wooing lime green frog who headlines the Muppets. According to a new study in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, Kermitops gratus was a proto-amphibian that lived 270 million years ago and possessed a skull that could fit in the palm of your hand....
Originally posted on salon.com
Mar 26, 2024 | Salon.com
A new study published in The Journals of Gerontology Series A finds that if you don’t take care of your teeth, you are more likely to suffer inflammation, reduced brain size and damage to your heart. At first glance, this may seem like a reach — what do teeth have to do with the brain and heart?...
Originally posted on salon.com