Science

For as little as $1 a tin, canned tuna is an excellent, affordable source of protein, polyunsaturated fats and other nutrients. A tin of tuna is significantly cheaper than many types of fresh meat or fish.

Sounds good, but how much can you eat before you need to worry about mercury?

The United States is experiencing an existential democracy crisis, with leading Republicans and millions of their voters and supporters either tacitly or explicitly embracing authoritarianism or fascism. Democrats, for the most part, have not responded with the urgency required to save America's democracy from the rising neofascist tide.

American society was founded on white settler colonialism, genocide and slavery. This unresolved "birth defect" at the foundation of the American democratic experiment meant that the country was racially exclusionary by design, from the founding well into the 20th century. At present, American politics is contoured by asymmetrical political polarization, in which Republicans have moved so far to the right that the party's most "moderate" members are far more extreme than the most "conservative" Democrats. This makes substantive compromise and bipartisanship in the interests of the common good and the American people almost impossible.

Extracts of okra and other slimy plants commonly used in cooking can help remove dangerous microplastics from wastewater, scientists said Tuesday.

The new research was presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, and offers an alternative to the synthetic chemicals currently used in treatment plants that can themselves pose risks to health.

In many countries, as restrictions lift and freedoms are restored, there’s a general feeling that the pandemic is over. There is, however, still the significant concern that a dangerous new variant could emerge.

This happened when omicron arrived, but we got lucky with that one. Omicron turned out to be more transmissible, but mercifully it hasn’t caused an increase in severe disease in most countries where it is dominant.

In early 2022, nearly two years after Covid was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, experts are mulling a big question: when is a pandemic “over”?

So, what’s the answer? What criteria should be used to determine the “end” of Covid’s pandemic phase? These are deceptively simple questions and there are no easy answers.

Africa’s forests are some of the natural wonders of the world. As someone who has spent decades studying the ecology and management of tropical forests, I’m constantly amazed by the unique forest ecosystems on the continent.

Some of them are most likely unknown to the public at large, yet so fascinating and important to face our world’s current biodiversity and climate challenges. Starting in the north-west and ending in the south-east, I’d like to share the ones that are special to me. This is a totally personal choice; others would have chosen other unique African forests, so large is the choice. But for how long?

In a huge milestone, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has finally been aligned to produce the first unified image of a single star.

Most traditional telescopes these days (like one you might have in your backyard) have a single primary mirror that collects distant light from stars. But the JWST has 18 mirrors! These had to be aligned extremely precisely to capture the image NASA released today.

Traditionally, people who are high in dark traits are considered to have empathy deficits, potentially making them more dangerous and aggressive than the rest of us. But we recently discovered something that challenges this idea. Our study, published in Personality and Individual Differences, identified a group of individuals with dark traits who report above-average empathic capacities – we call them “dark empaths”.

Since this study, the dark empath has earned a reputation as the most dangerous personality profile. But is this really the case?

But what exactly is open-source intelligence? And how is it helping efforts to understand what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine?

Broadly speaking, open-source intelligence describes the knowledge or insight emerging from focused collection, monitoring and analysis of publicly accessible information, now mostly online, using specialised methods and tools.