Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has said that tackling a chronic disease “epidemic” would be a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, often invoking alarming statistics as an urgent reason for reforming public health in this country. On Friday, President Trump released a proposed budget that called for cutting the funding of the Centers for …
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Two Scientific Groups Say They’ll Keep Working on U.S. Climate Assessment
The Trump administration last week dismissed the nearly 400 authors of the nation’s flagship climate report, saying in an email that the scope of the report was being reviewed. The move threw the future of the report, known as the National Climate Assessment, into limbo. On Friday, two major U.S. scientific organizations, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological …
Read More »Volcanic Eruption in Deep Ocean Ridge Is Witnessed by Scientists for First Time
Andrew Wozniak, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Delaware, struggled to process what his eyes were taking in. Dr. Wozniak was parked on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean beneath nearly 1.6 miles of water in Alvin, a research submersible. As far as he could see lay a mostly barren expanse of jet-black rock. Just a day before, at …
Read More »Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him Hundreds of Times
The video is just under two and a half minutes long. A slim man with close-cropped hair walks into a room, pulls a long black mamba — whose venom can kill within an hour — from a crate and allows it to bite his left arm. Immediately after, he lets a taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right arm. …
Read More »Federal Report Denounces Gender Treatments for Adolescents
Federal health officials published a report on Thursday declaring that the use of hormonal and surgical treatments in young people with gender dysphoria lacked scientific evidence and expressing concern about long-term harms, a stark reversal from previous agency recommendations and the advice of top U.S. medical groups. The report instead prioritized the role of psychotherapy, a divisive intervention to treat …
Read More »Ronan the Sea Lion Is Probably Better Than You at Keeping a Beat
This is Ronan. She’s a California sea lion and she probably has better rhythm than you. Scientists earlier showed that Ronan, a resident of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was the first nonhuman mammal who could be trained to keep a beat, including moving in time with music. That was in 2013 when Ronan …
Read More »How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding
When Lyubomirsky arrived at graduate school for social psychology at Stanford in 1989, academic research on happiness was only beginning to gain legitimacy. Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who would eventually be known for his work in the field, waited until he was granted tenure before tackling the subject, despite harboring a longstanding interest …
Read More »Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating.
Consciousness may be a mystery, but that doesn’t mean that neuroscientists don’t have any explanations for it. Far from it. “In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we don’t need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham. If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise …
Read More »Young People Are Not As Happy As They Used to Be, Study Finds
The happiness curve is collapsing. For decades, research showed that the way people experienced happiness across their lifetimes looked like a U-shaped curve. Happiness tended to be high when they were young, then dipped in midlife, only to rise again as they grew old. But recent surveys suggest that young adults aren’t as happy as they used to be, and …
Read More »Citing N.I.H. Cuts, a Top Science Journal Stops Accepting Submissions
Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain. For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” …
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