Do cats adjust their behavior to what works to get what they want or do they nag humans until people begin to respond in more agreeable ways?

Some cat owners, and probably most dog owners, might argue that cats engage in the latter and when it seems like the former it is just a lucky meeting of personalities. A new study in Animal Cognition finds they 'read the room' better than expected.

Cats were presented with a solvable task (an easily accessible treat in a container with a loose lid) and an unsolvable task (a treat in a closed container) in the presence of either an attentive or inattentive caregiver.

For the last 10,000 years the earth has been in a warming cycle. The latest ice age ended around that time, a recurring phenomenon in nature where 90,000 of every 100,000 years were ice ages.

How warm has it gotten compared to other warming bursts since the last ice age ended? A lot. Maps of global temperature changes for every 200-year interval going back 24,000 years finds that the magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the rest of the period - including when we were leaving an ice age.

As the crown jewel of Henry VIII’s, its flagship, the Mary Rose, patrolled the Atlantic with her heavy cannons for 34 years. It then spend 437 more buried beneath the turbulent English Channel before being recovered and placed on display at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England. 

The Mary Rose sank during a naval battle with France in 1543 and was excavated in 1982, along with 19,000 objects from the Tudor period. There remains one thing the 510-year-old English warship can't defeat; nature.

Even at prescription strength doses, purified omega-3 fatty acid did not reduce incidents of hospitalizations and/or deaths among people with COVID-19, according to results from Scientific Sessions 2021. 

Dyslexia is well-known to impact reading ability but it has been unclear which brain processes are affected by the condition. Whether dyslexia is, at its core, a visual processing disorder is hotly debated among researchers. With reading and writing a key challenge among children with dyslexia, increasing understanding of its effects on the brain might improve existing interventions. 

Anti-vaccine sentiment is not new but from the 1950s until the late 1990s it was isolated small pockets of deniers. With claims that MMR vaccines, and then preservatives in vaccines, caused autism, the west coast of America became overrun with vaccine denial. In 2021, anti-vaccine sentiment switched to middle America with COVID-19. 

The names change but health disinformation remains the same, as are ways to combat it. A recent study looked at combating typhoid misinformation in Sierra Leone and found that explicitly addressing falsehoods seems more effective in busting misbeliefs than simply stating scientific facts.