Community: Science

A huge iceberg (1270 km²) the size of the county of Bedfordshire has broken off the 150-m thick Brunt Ice Shelf.

A sealed letter in the 300-year-old Brienne Collection held at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, Netherlands, has been read for the first time without opening it, thanks to X-ray technology and computer algorithms, a new study has revealed.

They're the poo-loving superbugs that are greening Queensland's sewage systems with their big appetite. Now a Brisbane wastewater plant has farmed enough Anammox bugs to fill 10 swimming pools.

Covid-19 lockdowns helped global emissions plummet by a record 5.6 per cent during 2020, but worldwide emissions are already back to levels seen before the pandemic, according to new data

New chemical reactors don't require fossil fuels and may even consume greenhouse gas

The unusual breeding history of the Earth’s largest living lizard – the Komodo dragon – has been laid bare in a new study from The Australian National University.  The Komodo dragon is best known for its size and hunting skills, reaching up to three metres long and preying on buffaloes, deer, and even the occasional human. But that’s not all that sets it apart. 

Social connection is essential to physical and psychological well-being, and conversation is the primary means by which it is achieved. And yet, scientists know little about it—about how it starts, how it unfolds, or how it ends. Our studies attempted to remedy this deficit, and their results were surprising: conversations almost never end when anyone wants them to! At a moment in history when billions of people have been forced to curtail their normal social activities and to reimagine this one, a scientific understanding of conversation could hardly be timelier.
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The data and code necessary for reproducing all analyses, tables, and figures are available at the Open Science Framework at .
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Study of nearly 7,000 elementary school students demonstrates success of school-based model and its potential to reduce health disparities and save federal dollars

We hypothesize that megafauna extinctions throughout the Pleistocene, that led to a progressive decline in large prey availability, were a primary selecting agent in key evolutionary and cultural changes in human prehistory. The Pleistocene human past is characterized by a series of transformations that include the evolution of new physiological traits and the adoption, assimilation, and replacement of cultural and behavioral patterns. ... Some changes, such as brain expansion, use of fire, developments in stone-tool technologies, or the scale of resource intensification, were uncharacteristically progressive. We previously hypothesized that humans specialized in acquiring large prey because of their higher foraging efficiency, high biomass density, higher fat content, and the use of less complex tools for their acquisition. Here, we argue that the need to mitigate the additional energetic cost of acquiring progressively smaller prey may have been an ecological selecting agent in fundamental adaptive modes demonstrated in the Paleolithic archaeological record. We describe several potential associations between prey size decline and specific evolutionary and cultural changes that might have been driven by the need to adapt to increased energetic demands while hunting and processing smaller and smaller game.
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People with a heightened sense of entitlement are more likely believe that measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are unfair, which in turn ...

A new study finds that on average, participants wished their conversations had been 1.9 minutes (or 24%) longer than they were.

Environmental Health Perspectives is an Open Access journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Neanderthals — the closest ancestor to modern humans — possessed the ability to perceive and produce human speech, according to a new study published by an international team of researchers, including Associate Professor of Anthropology Rolf Quam.

Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) Leading through science.

While COVID-19-related lockdowns may have decreased the spread of a deadly virus, they appear to have created an ideal environment for increased domestic violence. Extra stress in the COVID-19 pandemic caused by income loss, and lack of ability to pay for housing and food has exacerbated the often silent epidemic of intimate partner violence, suggests a new University of

More and more studies have paid attention to how cyberbullying victimization leads to adolescents' suicide ideation. The present study explored a new …