Mental health
fromPsychology Today
18 minutes agoA New Narrative for Planetary Health in the Hybrid Era
Perceiving crises as external leads to helplessness and disengagement, while recognizing agency fosters positive outcomes and behavior change.
'Our results show that the next 20 years are critical,' lead author Dr Rob Cooke told the Daily Mail. 'By around 2050, we reach a point where the choices we make on emissions and land use will largely determine whether Britain moves towards a much more degraded or a much more nature‑positive future.'
A study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley has found that ethanol is surprisingly common in floral nectar, the sugary fuel that keeps pollinators alive. Yeast feeding on those sugars produces trace amounts of alcohol, and in this study, it showed up in 26 of the 29 plant species sampled.
During major floods, thousands of tiny fish convene at Luvilombo Falls in the upper Congo River Basin to undertake a peculiar vertical migration, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports.
If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested.
Animals' risk of becoming roadkill depends on several factors, including how many vehicles are on the road, how many animals are on the road, and how animals and human drivers behave, explains Tom Langen, a professor of biology at Clarkson University, who studies animal-vehicle collisions. DST can minimize these collisions, however.
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, de-extinct via the birth of three new pups.
Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years.
To capture the biological impact of this extreme environment, I used a comprehensive suite of sensors and biomarker analyses. I wore a wireless electroencephalograph (EEG) system to monitor brain activity, sleep stages and neural signatures of stress and adaptation; the Oura Ring to continuously track sleep patterns, heart-rate variability and circadian-rhythm shifts; and the glucose monitor to follow metabolic responses in real time.
"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."
Because we're homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, we're starting to find a lot more weirdness.
Signs of ageing accelerated when fish were exposed to the chemicals, according to the study, which could have implications for other organisms. Chemical safety regulations tend to focus on short-term exposure to high doses of pesticides and other chemicals, but the study focused on long-term exposure. Low doses of pesticides are widespread in the environment, so their effects should be studied and understood, the authors said.
"Granted, "[p]lants have extensive and well established mechanisms of communication, with that of volatiles being the most well studied and understood," he added. "There is also growing recognition that root exudates play a role in plant-plant interactions, though this is only now being deeply investigated. Nothing else, communication through mychorriza, has withstood independent investigation."
With a major winter storm about to blast pretty much every US state east of the Rocky Mountains, many are scrambling to prepare for the cold, ice, and snow. And according to popular meteorology influencer Max Schuster, there's yet another winter-weather hazard to watch out for: trees exploding in the frigid air. On a viral post on X-formerly-Twitter, Schuster - who holds a meteorology degree