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The biological and cultural profile of mate has affected its global expansion, unlike other plants native to the Americas, such as cacao and maize. Read more...
Opium has been used as a medicinal and recreational substance in China for centuries, its shifting meanings tied to class and national identity. Read more...
A newly discovered interaction related to quantum entanglement between dissimilar particles opens a new window into the nuclei of atoms
By Stephanie Pappas
Fossil flower of Symplocos kowalewskii (Symplocaceae) from Baltic amber – to date, by far the largest floral inclusion discovered from any amber. Credit:Carola Radke, MfN (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
A rare flower encased in amber is the largest one ever found and dates from around 40 million years ago
By Jack Tamisiea
The fossilization process is an unrelenting slog of decay, compression and erosion that can take millions of years and favors the preservation of tough material such as bones, teeth and shells. But with a little bit of sticky tree resin and a lot of luck, delicate bits of plants and tiny critters can sometimes last for tens of millions of years. As the resin petrifies and turns into amber, it preserves whatever gets stuck inside of it—including insects,slime moldsand evenpint-sized dinosaurs—in a gold-tinted time capsule./.../
Many swear by the drug’s ability to ease chronic pain. But experts say the evidence for it is “questionable”—and it may just be the placebo effect.
BYMERYL DAVIDS LANDAU PUBLISHED JANUARY 6, 2023
For David Hao, a chronic pain physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the conversation with a new patient experiencing severe chronic pain generally goes like this: He lays out possible treatments, including steroid injections, ablation of painful nerves, acupuncture, physical therapy, or surgery. But toward the end of the appointment, some inevitably ask, “Do you think I should try marijuana?”/.../
The world population has grown rapidly over the past century: in 1900, there were fewer than 2 billion people on the planet. Now in 2023, the world population is more than 8 billion.
The change in the world population is determined by two metrics: the number of babies born, and the number of people dying.
In this article, we look at the data on births and deaths each year. We also look at how these are projected to change in the coming decades, and what this means for population growth.
Originally published in 2019, we recently updated this article with the latest available data.
Good health, a place to live, access to education, nutrition, social connections, respect, peace, human rights, a healthy environment, happiness. These are just some of the many aspects we care about in our lives.
For many of these aspects, we require particular goods and services: the health services from nurses and doctors, the home you live in, or the teachers that provide education.
Poverty, prosperity, and economic growth are often measured in monetary terms, most commonly as people’s income. But while monetary measures have some important advantages, they have the big disadvantage that they are abstract.
In the worst case, monetary measures — like GDP per capita — are so abstract that we forget what they are actually about: people’s access to goods and services.
In this article, we explain why economic growth is important, and what the abstract monetary measures tell us about the reality of people’s material living conditions around the world and throughout history.
Ants Live 10 Times Longer by Altering Their Insulin Responses
By VIVIANE CALLIER
Queen ants live far longer than genetically identical workers. Researchers are learning what their longevity secrets could mean for aging in other species.
Star Material By observing the oscillations of neutron stars that have merged, astronomers could determine whether their interior is squishy or solid, writes Paul Lasky for Nature. One mystery is whether neutron stars contain quark matter — a squishy goo that compresses under gravity. In 2021, Jonathan O’Callaghan reported for Quanta that neutron stars of different masses were the same size, which implies that they do not contain quark matter.
Young on the Inside Scientists are working on drugs that fight aging by killing decrepit cells that sabotage tissues, writes Amber Dance for Knowable Magazine. When old cells become “senescent,” they stop dividing and secrete molecules that cause inflammation. Steven Strogatz spoke with researcher Judith Campisi about senescence and aging for Quanta's podcast “The Joy of Why” in July.
#NY REVEW of BOOKS
Free from the Archives
The Hungarian American historian István Deák died on Tuesday, aged ninety-six. Starting in 1981 he contributed dozens of essays to The New York Review, usually focused on fascism, World War II, and modern Europe, but he also wrote about Hungarian film and literature and, in our March 16, 1989, issue, the history of Budapest, “a place where aristocrats, burghers, and workers preferred the same food; where the finance aristocracy dreamed of buying country manors and estates; and where hundreds of industrialists, businessmen, lawyers, judges, and artists sought and obtained patents of nobility from Emperor-King Francis Joseph.”
“Budapest resembled Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, not only because of its miraculous rate of growth, but also because its labor force often spoke the same tongues as those toiling in the American Midwest. In fact, the road for many led from the Hungarian villages and hamlets to Budapest, from there to the American or Canadian Midwest, and then back again to Hungary, with money to buy a little land or to build a house.”
A whirlwind of pain and emotions may make you feel stuck when loss happens. Creating memorials and sharing positive memories may help you manage your grief.
Group A Streptococcus infections (strep A) are common and often mild, typically presenting as tonsillitis, pharyngitis, or impetigo. But recent data from the UK show an unusually high incidence of severe strep A with increased reports of scarlet fever cases and progression to invasive group A streptococcal disease (iGAS).
Esse endereço colocou o Rio Grande do Sul em um seleto top 4: com a fábrica Casa A Electrica (grafia da época), apenas a capital gaúcha e outras três cidades no mundo possuíam maquinário capaz de gravar as músicas interpretadas pelos conjuntos no início do século 20. Segunda em toda a América Latina a prensar discos, a indústria do Estado tinha ainda a marca de pioneira a montar gramofones, até então importados e inacessíveis à população menos abastada – o equipamento podia custar três salários mínimos, dependendo do modelo escolhido.... #TV5 Monde
The Sound of Stars Astronomers are translating their data into sounds to make their field more accessible to blind and visually impaired people, writes Timmy Broderick for Scientific American. “Seeing” the data in new ways could potentially lead to new discoveries too. In 2017, astronomers applied their musical knowledge to the TRAPPIST-1 system and found that the orbital periods of its exoplanets formed a major ninth chord. For Quanta, Joshua Sokol wrote about the “music of the spheres” that the scientists composed based on this data.
Nice Signature A new kind of “Bayesian machine” can learn to recognize a person’s signature with less training than a standard neural network, reports Nature Magazine. The microprocessor uses Bayesian reasoning to draw conclusions from incomplete information. Computer scientist Judea Pearl, who conceived of Bayesian networks in the 1980s, is now teaching computers about cause and effect. In 2018 for Quanta, Kevin Hartnett interviewed Pearl about this key step to building a truly intelligent machine.
New Nature paper provides evidence that science has become less innovative since the 1950s. The authors suggest reversing the trend by:
1. reading widely,
2. focusing less on quantity of papers, & more on research quality,
3. taking year-long sabbaticals.
https://nature.com/articles/s4158
a,b, Decline in CD5 over time, separately for papers (a, n = 24,659,076) and patents (b, n = 3,912,353). For papers, lines correspond to WoS research areas; from 1945 to 2010 the magnitude of decline ranges from 91.9% (social sciences) to 100% (physical sciences). For patents, lines correspond to National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) technology categories; from 1980 to 2010 the magnitude of decline ranges from 93.5% (computers and communications) to 96.4% (drugs and medical). Shaded bands correspond to 95% confidence intervals. As we elaborate in the Methods, this pattern of decline is robust to adjustment for confounding from changes in publication, citation and authorship practices over time. Source data
As we ring in the new calendar year, IHME experts share the key health issues they’re keeping an eye on, such as long COVID and mental health.Read the list→
