We're going to learn a lot more about how bats do all of the things they do, in part due to the work of the Bat1K consortium to sequence the genome of six widely divergent living bat species.

Is it possible to predict nonlinear behavior, such as when a protest will become a riot? Perhaps, though parameters bring special challenges.

We've seen the weaknesses of numerical modeling when it comes to disease epidemiology, and many of those concerns were evident before SARS-CoV-2 took the world by storm. In Chile of 2019, social unrest disrupted the daily routines of many citizens so scholars recently combined well-known epidemic models with tools from the physics of chaos and interpreted their findings through the lens of social science as economics.

In many groups, everyone seems to agree more or less all the time. Meetings are dominated by a few individuals or even one while everyone else plays along - until you talk to people individually.  

Why does such meeting inertia happen? For some, voicing disagreement is difficult. Some may want the meeting to be over, so piping up five minutes before it is scheduled to end brings rancor that has nothing to do with the content. Some may want to just get along. Others believe that the process is working so nothing needs to change.

Yet if you ask leaders they will tell you "it's working" is destructive, even if they subtly invoke it.

Experimental physics is about investigating the world in a quantitative manner, by exploiting our technology to carefully map the wealth of phenomena that make planets turn around stars, atoms stick together, and hearts to beat. All of that can be understood by creating models of the underlying physics processes. These models need to be fed with input parameters which we must measure.

Though there is concern about inequality in outcomes when it comes to medicine, how much is due to lifestyle choices and the co-morbidities they bring and if any is prejudice by care providers is unclear.

Yet data can inform smaller populations. And an analysis of women with the SARS-CoV-2 infection who gave birth at two hospitals in northern Manhattan during the height of New York City's COVID-19 pandemic, the national epicenter, did not find a difference in impact on obstetric complications and symptoms of COVID-19 in different groups of women, regardless of income, race or ethnicity. 

Leeches are found on every continent in freshwater habitats where there is little flow. They are popular bait for fishing, and doctors continue to use them in medical treatments. Environmentalists have even been using them to advance their beliefs that trace levels of "endocrine disrupting" chemicals are harmful.

by Gurkiran Dhuga&Glen Pyle

The fight for equality between the sexes has undoubtedly made significant advances recently. But a new meta-analysis examining sex differences in treatment for cardiovascular risk factors presents a depressing snapshot of the current state of medicine. In fact, it suggests that in order to make progress, we may need to go all the way back to the beginning. Back to primary care.

A Primary Deficiency

Music is in most aspects of our lives we probably don't even notice it - but it can be noticed in our brains.

A new study examined the brains of non-musicians, western classical musicians, and eastern classical musicians, as they were exposed to unfamiliar rhythms and non-rhythmic patterns. As you would expect, trained musicians have mastered auditory statistical learning, so they showed greater powers of rhythmic prediction compared to non-musicians, but what was intriguing were differences between those trained in Japanese and Western classical music. 

Dermatopathologists, skin cancer specialists, may be ordering additional tests or second opinions out of caution but they may also be thinking about checking off boxes to prevent malpractice lawsuits.

After centuries of converging on balanced, smooth beers, the industry suddenly lurched sideways in the 21st century. While large brands now have to fear for their existence, men in beards are making a fortune selling pronounced, bitter craft brews.

The business segment may have been with us all along, according to a new analysis. The survey of 109 beer consumers in a blind experiment found that greater perceived bitterness increased the appeal of beers. This is the opposite of most foods.