Science

Baby boys babble more than girls, according to a scientific paper out Wednesday that upends a common belief that females hold a language advantage over males early on in life.

The findings, published in iScience after the largest ever study on the subject, came as a surprise even to the paper's authors.

One of the most common stereotypes about the human past is that men did the hunting while women did the gathering. That gendered division of labor, the story goes, would have provided the meat and plant foods people needed to survive.

That characterization of our time as a species exclusively reliant on wild foods – before people started domesticating plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago – matches the pattern anthropologists observed among hunter-gatherers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all of the large-game hunting they documented was performed by men.

New research on old bones has shed light on pterosaur fossils from the early Cretaceous period of Australia, which took place roughly 107 million years ago.

The bones were discovered in Victoria in the late 1980s at a fossil site called Dinosaur Cove, a few hours’ drive west of Melbourne.

Some companies are now using tools that combine facial recognition software with artificial intelligence to constantly monitor and assess how much their workers are concentrating while on the job, The Guardian reports.

A woman in her 20s called Mae who spoke with the Guardian recounted how incredibly stressful it is to have your facial expressions monitored and cataloged in ways that will be used to evaluate your performance.

Officials and climate experts in Nova Scotia, Canada on Tuesday pointed to numerous climate-related factors that have contributed to the wildfires that are raging in the province this week, forcing the evacuation of more than 16,000 people and destroying roughly 200 homes and other structures.

The Tantallon fire in the Halifax area and the Barrington Lake fire in the southwestern county of Shelburne have burned through a combined 25,000 acres in the Maritime province, which, as one firefighter told the Canadian newspaper SaltWire, has historically been far less likely to experience such blazes than landlocked western provinces.

The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures.

The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is “mismanaged”, meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled.

The condition often only hits the headlines after violent attacks by sufferers, such as a schizophrenic patient who stabbed a nurse to death last week in the French city of Reims.

But French psychiatrist Sonia Dollfus emphasised that such cases of violence by people with schizophrenia are "extremely rare".

It marked the latest space milestone for China, as it looks to catch up with the United States and Russia.

Here is a look at the Chinese space program, and where it is headed:

Health practitioners are increasingly concerned that because race is a social construct, and the biological mechanisms of how race affects clinical outcomes are often unknown, including race in predictive algorithms for clinical decision-making may worsen inequities.

For example, to calculate an estimate of kidney function called the estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, health care providers use an algorithm based on age, biological sex, race (Black or non-Black) and serum creatinine, a waste product the kidneys release into the blood. A higher eGFR value means better kidney health. These eGFR predictions are used to allocate kidney transplants in the U.S.

Can a computer learn from the past and anticipate what will happen next, like a human? You might not be surprised to hear that some cutting-edge AI models could achieve this feat, but what about a computer that looks a little different – more like a tank of water?

We have built a small proof-of-concept computer that uses running water instead of a traditional logical circuitry processor, and forecasts future events via an approach called “reservoir computing”.

It is a simulation to see how the lungs of the world will endure global warming.

The AmazonFACE project, co-financed by Brazil and the United Kingdom, is "an open-air laboratory that will allow us to understand how the rainforest will behave in future climate change scenarios," says Carlos Quesada, one of the project coordinators.