In 1994, the term “atmospheric river” appeared in a paper to describe narrow amounts of atmospheric water vapor across the mid-latitudes but now a week doesn't go by without a weather forecaster on the local news claiming it is hitting their viewers.

The catchy name was new but the phenomenon was well-known prior to that. Scientists had long known that how moisture is transported through the atmosphere makes a difference in snowpacks and floods. The "Pineapple Express" is a well-known current from Hawaii to California and early analyses of climate changed were criticized for not controlling during those or events like El Nino.

Sixteen-year-old Karl is seen for the first time in my optometry practice. He was referred to me for a fluctuating vision problem. During his examination, I saw signs suggesting he may have diabetes, which could have explained the fluctuating vision. This suspicion became a reality when his family doctor confirmed the diagnosis. Karl’s world was turned upside down.

As an optometrist, I invite you to dive into a reality that should concern us all.

An epidemiological look at 1,981 women who reported a positive SARS-CoV-2 test found that those with pre-infection healthy lifestyle had a substantially lower "risk" of the post–COVID-19 condition known as 'long COVID.' 

It is just correlation but it brings to light concerns about how much of an impact co-morbidities and lifestyle had on the effects of SARS-CoV-2 and lingering effects. And how much benefit health care workers would have derived from healthier lifestyles prior to the pandemic.

As technology continues to advance, it will one day be possible to grow organs and even faces from a patient's own stem cells. Until then there are transplants from donors.

Such donors are often anonymous but in the case of Belgium's first facial transplant, that isn't really possible. A recent "interpretive phenomenological analysis" of the experience of family members of the deceased tissue donor may provide insight for what to expect in the future and how to prepare. 

Some food grown in the US, especially high-cost luxuries like almonds, are pollinated using bees. Since bees are most often rented and transported for such purposes, keeping them alive is important to owners and growers. As their value for higher-cost foods has grown, so have bee numbers; they are up 85 percent in the last 60 years. You would just never know it if your source is Greenpeace, so when you use verbiage identical to Greenpeace press releases in an academic paper press release your work is going to be suspect. And that is a paper on bee deaths we'll discuss today.

Most people go into relationships intending to be monogamous, or at least convincing themselves they can remain faithful, but with cheap travel and dating apps, any small problem can become a permanent schism.

A new paper sought to understand if virtual reality can be used to examine the circumstances that will help people in a monogamous relationship resist the temptations of infidelity.

It is easy to believe ants disperse and walk randomly until they find something they want, but a new paper says they may have a more methodical approach.

At least one species of rock ant, Temnothorax rugatulus, doesn’t walk randomly at all. Instead, their search combines systematic meandering with random walks interspersed. They alternate left and right turns on a relatively regular length scale of roughly three body lengths.

SIR, shorthand for Susceptible people, Infected people, and Recovered people, modeling is, along with R0, a rule of thumb for disease epidemiology but it failed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with three coronavirus pandemics since 2003 they are the new normal, so the race is on to make better predictive analytics and restore public confidence.

A new model used COVID-19 data for calibration and integrated SIR compartment modeling in time and a point process modeling approach in space–time, while also taking into account age-specific contact patterns. To do this, they used a two-step framework that allowed them to model data on infectious locations over time for different age groups.

Is there an addiction that primarily affects one gender in one age demographic in rich countries? Survey data using the National Poll on Healthy Aging says there may be. 

The results were that about 13 percent of people from ages 50 to 80 responded in ways that could be interpreted as addiction to foods and beverages in the past year. Prevalence was much higher among women than men – older Generation X and younger Baby Boomer women.

Yesterday I profited of the kindness of Cesar Ocampo, the site manager of the Parque Astronomico near San Pedro de Atacama, in northern Chile, to visit a couple of places that the SWGO collaboration is considering as the site of a large array of particle detectors meant to study ultra-high-energy gamma rays from the sky. 

SWGO and cosmic ray showers