Chimpanzee Dialect Grows More Distinct With Age
Chimpanzee grunts, laughs and whimpers grow more population specific with age, a new study finds, hinting that experience, not genes alone, shapes primate vocal dialects.
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Alzheimer’s Brain Damage May Start in the Neck
Mice bred with tau pathology and Alzheimer’s genetics lost their brain-damaging immune response when researchers deleted a scarce class of dendritic cells that operates entirely in lymph nodes outside the brain.
Why What We Know About Polarization Is Mostly American
A global review of political polarization research finds that most studies, and nearly all the field’s rigorous experiments, focus on the United States, while replications run elsewhere have sometimes found the opposite effect entirely.
Smartwatches Overestimate Calories, Worse at Higher Body Fat
Wrist worn fitness trackers can overshoot workout calorie counts by wide margins, and the four most popular models get less accurate the more body fat a wearer has, a new lab study using clinical grade metabolic testing finds.
Pet Talk Varies Wildly, and That May Explain the Pet Effect
University of Arizona researchers eavesdropped on 240 people’s phones to catalog exactly how they talk to a pet, from cooing baby talk to lecturing the cat like a roommate, and found barely two habits alike.
Ethical Investors Trim Emissions, But Some Just Relocate
Companies under pressure from ESG (environmental, social and governance) investors do shrink their own carbon footprint, new research finds, but a meaningful share of that pollution simply resurfaces at suppliers, leaving the combined total largely unchanged.
All the Lonely Workers: Where Do They All Come From?
UK survey data show 18-to-29-year-olds now spend up to two more hours alone each day than in 2014-15, driven mostly by remote work rather than phone use, even as loneliness rates climbed alongside them.
The Shape of Every Breath Matches the Shape of a Brain Wave
Epilepsy patients wearing brain electrodes revealed that a breath’s rise and fall lines up with brain wave activity, but only through the nose, not a chest strap, and only in a narrow slice of recordings.
Pro-Russian Hackers Turn Web Outages Into Psychological Warfare
A pro-Russian hacker collective has launched more than 1,500 DDoS attacks since 2022, paying volunteers in cryptocurrency while treating each outage as a stage for undermining public trust in NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) governments.
Fire Came to the Amazon Only After People Did
A decade-spanning survey of 1,361 radiocarbon dates across the Amazon Basin finds charcoal nearly absent before human arrival and widespread soon after, tracing 10,000 years of fire driven almost entirely by people, not climate.
One Overlooked Number Could Flip the Vehicle Pollution Rollback
Correcting a single accounting error in how regulators value fuel savings could turn the federal rollback of vehicle pollution rules from a $790 billion win into a net loss, ten economists argue in a new Science paper.
A Stronger Magnet Could Help Spacecraft Survive Reentry
A pulsed, redesignable electromagnet outperformed the permanent magnets used in past reentry tests, widening a model spacecraft’s shock layer and hinting at heat shields that reshape their own protective field mid flight.