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.

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. 

In some good news for 2020, it is confirmed that SARS-CoV-2, the 2019 form of coronavirus that has led to worldwide COVID-19 disease, is not transmitted by mosquitoes, so ecologically useless disease vectors like Aedes aegypti, that carry so many other diseases, can't get blame for the spread of this one during the summer season.

The World Health Organisation had already said mosquitoes did not transmit it, but they also claimed that it did not spread human-to-human and that China was a reliable source of data, so their credibility is suspect. While their hand-picked epidemiologists may trust the word of dictatorships, scientists elsewhere don't, so the new study is the first independent assurance that mosquitoes won't make this worse.

Bad things come in threes, it is said, and nothing shows that more than The Carnian Age; the first stage of three in the mass extinction era of the Late Triassic Epoch 228 to 217 million years ago.

It had three features; dramatic climate change with much higher humidity, the first dinosaurs appeared, and gigantic volcanic eruptions called the Wrangellia large igneous province spewed out greenhouse gases.

For dinosaurs, climate change was a good thing because plant life grew, thanks to the humid conditions and higher carbon dioxide. That event, now called the Carnian Pluvial Episode, may have been caused by the Wrangellia volcanic eruptions. The confluence of events seems to have spurred the early diversification of dinosaurs.

Social justice warriors in the feminist movement often fail to advocate for the rights of black women, according to new research, and it's for a reason that highlights hidden bias problems in modern performative activism - social justice for the Instagram photo - movement. Social justice warriors see black women as less like white women and more like black men.

A theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos, and of their role in the formation of the universe. But there is no evidence it actually exists.

The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments trying to see if it does and preliminary results based on data collected from March 2019 to April 2020 set a new limit for the neutrinoless double-beta decay process in an isotope of molybdenum known as Mo-100. But not a single event was detected in CUPID-Mo after one year of data-taking.

Isotopes are forms of an element that carry a different number of uncharged particles called neutrons in their atomic nuclei.