When leaders of Florida’s most populous county met in September to pick a site for what could become the nation’s largest trash incinerator, so many people went to the government center to protest that overflow seating spilled into the building’s atrium. “MIRAMAR SAYS NO TO INCINERATOR! NOT IN OUR BACKYARD,” read green T-shirts donned by...
Dr. Nobuyuki Kawai from Nagoya University in Japan has found that the rapid detection of snakes by monkeys is because of the presence of snake scales as a visual cue. His findings highlight an evolutionary adaptation of primates to identify snakes based on specific visual characteristics. Understanding these mechanisms provides insight into the evolution of...
In 2024, space exploration dazzled the world. NASA’s Europa Clipper began its journey to study Jupiter’s moon Europa. SpaceX’s Starship achieved its first successful landing, a critical milestone for future deep space missions. China made headlines with the Chang’e 6 mission, which successfully returned samples from the far side of the Moon. Meanwhile, the International...
As it passed above the Niger Delta in 2021, a satellite took an image. It showed acres of land, scraped bare. The site, outside the city of Port Harcourt, was on a cleanup list kept by the United Nations Environment Programme, supposed to be restored to green farmland as the Delta was before thousands of...
A choice was made to include each word in this sentence. Every message, even the most mundane, is crafted with a specific frame in mind that impacts how the message is perceived. The study of framing effects is a multidisciplinary line of research that investigates when, how, and why language influences those who receive a...
The pace at which anthropogenic climate change has altered the terrestrial carbon stores is making our current climate-change mitigation efforts seem fruitless, unless behaviors are quickly changed. Climate change induced by human behaviors, or anthropogenic climate change, has been a hot topic for decades and is not going away. As with any problem, reviewing datasets...
For many countries around the world, December is an intense, commercialised period of gift-giving. Not just within families but across all sorts of relationships, such as gifts between buyers and service providers. Gift-giving, the act of presenting someone with a gift is intended to convey thoughtfulness, appreciation, or goodwill. The gift can be a tangible...
One of the most significant African museum openings of 2024 was the Musée des Rois Bamoun, or Museum of the Bamoun Kings, in Foumban, Cameroon. Housing over 10,000 objects, it offers more than 600 years of history in its display of the treasures of the Bamoun kingdom, one of the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa. The...
There were no antebellum hoop skirts at the site of Brazil’s annual “Festa Confederada,” or Confederate Festival, in 2024. Flag poles that once flew the Brazilian flag alongside the red, white and blue rebel banner of the American Confederacy stood barren. Since 1980, the Confederate Festival – a series of cultural performances and culinary experiences...
The Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet, focuses on Dylan’s early 1960s transition from idiosyncratic singer of folk songs to internationally renowned singer-songwriter. As a music historian, I’ve always respected one decision of Dylan’s in particular – one that kicked off the young artist’s most turbulent and significant period of creative activity....
