Even previously considerate and helpful male managers have become less likely to mentor female employees, according to a new study. They've become less likely to even talk one-on-one with women.

This unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement could deny female employees critical development and thus career advancement. Women are not the problem, a large portion of female employees report a willingness to be mentored by an older male co-worker, but career advancement also has a social component, and in the last few years men are less likely to work one-on-one in an office with the door closed and less likely to engage in social behavior, like a post-work dinner with female employees.

Whatever Uncanny Valley when it comes to machines still existed in 2019 got a lot smaller in 2020. We're even being nicer to them since 2020.

People mostly dispense with social norms of human interaction and treat machines differently. The behavior holds true even as machines became more "human" seeming, such as Amazon's Alexa or Morgan Freeman in your vehicle navigation system.

Human default behavior is often driven by heuristic thinking -- the snap judgments people use to navigate complex daily interactions. The Uncanny Valley says that as artificial things begin to seem more human, but not close enough to pass for human, we are put off. 

That all changed due to COVID-19. We got nicer toward our machine and other people.

The latest numbers on honeybee colonies have been released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and they show that the Beepocalypse we keep being warned about has been postponed for another year.

“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.”

― Karl Popper¹

Schizophrenia can cause hallucinations, delusions, trouble with thinking and other behaviors that impact daily functioning. Though it affects less than 1% of the public, 60% of schizophrenic smoke cigarettes, a known carcinogen and risk factor for numerous diseases; a 500 percent increase over the general population, where smoking has plummeted thanks to greater awareness of its harms plus smoking cessation tools like nicotine gums, patches, and vaping.

A few years ago, a study claimed that in gender blind symphony auditions, women scored 30 percent better. Harvard gender studies authors concluded that there was gender bias in hiring and that was the reason for a gender gap in symphony orchestra compositions.

The Italian "Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei" is an old institution, founded in 1603 to promote and cultivate natural science studies. It counted Galileo Galilei as a member, and it has never ceased to pursue its goal. Nowadays, it is an excellence cultural centre and is among the advisors of the President of the Republic.

In Mongolia, plants preserved in a volcanic ash fall deposit as part of a so-called "vegetational Pompeii," may have resolved the mystery of the Noeggerathiales.

What are Noeggerathiales? Paleontologists have wanted to really know since they first learned of them.

Scientists know they were peat-forming plants that lived approximately 325-251 million years ago but their relationships with other plant groups was unknown. Were they an evolutionary dead end? Now it has been established that Noeggerathiales had the spore propagation mode of ferns and the vascular tissue of seed plants. They belonged to a sister group of seed plants, the former gymnosperm.