Author: Ranveer Kumar

AN INACCESSIBLE CAVE PRESERVED CLUES TO JAMAICA’S CLIMATE PAST IN THE SEDIMENTARY LAYERS OF BAT GUANO WASHINGTON—Deep in a Jamaican cave is a treasure trove of bat poop, deposited in sequential layers by generations of bats over 4,300 years. Analogous to records of the past found in layers of lake mud and Antarctic ice, the guano pile is roughly the height of a tall man (2 meters), largely undisturbed, and holds information about changes in climate and how the bats’ food sources shifted over the millennia, according to a new study. “We study natural archives and reconstruct natural histories, mostly…

Even before Covid-19, ‘excess deaths’ in the US were higher than in peer European countries How many Americans would die each year, on average, if the country had European mortality rates? Far fewer, suggests a new analysis, which compared mortality trends before the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite spending far more than other wealthy countries on healthcare, the United States has relatively higher mortality rates and lower life expectancy – attributed to a plethora of factors including obesity, opioid overdoses, gun violence, suicides, smoking, road accidents and infant deaths. Given the US does not have a universal healthcare system like most high-income European countries,…

Legalizing medical marijuana has either decreased or had no effect on teenage cannabis use, and initial evidence suggests that recreational legalization has similar effects, according to a new comprehensive review of studies on the topic. The working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in April, also explores literature around the effects of medical and recreational marijuana legalization on other public health outcomes including tobacco smoking, use of opioids and other prescription drugs, traffic fatalities and overall crime. It considers results from more than 140 studies. “The section of the paper that I think is most interesting to…

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A desert city built on a reputation for excess and indulgence wants to become a model for restraint and conservation with a first-in-the-nation policy banning grass that nobody walks on. Las Vegas-area water officials have spent two decades trying to get people to replace thirsty greenery with desert plants, and now they’re asking the Nevada Legislature to outlaw roughly 40% of the turf that’s left. The Southern Nevada Water Authority estimates there are almost 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) of “nonfunctional turf” in the metro area — grass that no one ever walks on or…

A “first-of-its-kind” study by researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Oslo has found that overfishing is not likely to be causing evolutionary changes and early maturation in the Atlantic cod fish population. The research study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.1 There’re not always plenty of fish in the sea Overfishing, in its most simple form, is the fishing of wildlife from a body of water at a rate that is too high for the species to breed and recover, ultimately leading to a depletion or the full collapse of a species. It is…

Gray wolves are among the largest predators to have survived the extinction at the end of the last ice age around11,700 years ago. Today, they can be found roaming Yukon’s boreal forest and tundra, with caribou and moose as their main sources of food. A new study led by the Canadian Museum of Nature shows that wolves may have survived by adapting their diet over thousands of years—-from a primary reliance on horses during the Pleistocene, to caribou and moose today. The results are published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The research team, led by museum palaeontologist Dr. Danielle Fraser and student…

Scientists studying spinifex unearth the good and bad of soil microbes. Scientists say they may have solved a longstanding mystery of how Australia’s iconic spinifex got its distinctive ring shape. It seems the grasses die off in the middle due to a build-up of pathogenic soil microbes. “People generally think about the beneficial effects of soil microbes, which can help plants access water and nutrients,” says Angela Moles from the University of New South Wales, senior author of a paper published in the Australian Journal of Botany. “However, there are lots of pathogenic microbes in soil too.” Spinifex (Triodia spp) grows in arid and…

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people. This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power…

Abstract Social networks of minoritized societal groups may be exposed to a unique structural force, namely that of social exclusion. Using a national sample of people in same-sex and different-sex relationships in the Netherlands (N = 1,329), this study examines sexual orientation as stratifying factor in social networks. Specifically, it is a comparison of their size and composition. Overall, the networks are similar but a few differences stand out. People in same-sex relationships have larger networks than people in different-sex relationships, which are made up of fewer ties with the family-of-origin and more friends. This lends support to the families-of-choice hypothesis and…

Topic(s): Risk Factors and Prevention Physical Inactivity and Exercise Sophia Antipolis, 9 April 2021:  The first large study showing that leisure time physical activity and occupational physical activity have opposite, and independent, associations with cardiovascular disease risk and longevity is published today in European Heart Journal, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 “We adjusted for multiple factors in our analysis, indicating that the relationships were not explained by lifestyle, health conditions or socioeconomic status,” said study author Professor Andreas Holtermann of the National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen, Denmark. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends physical activity…