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This semi-aquatic lizard produces a bubble over its nostrils to continue breathing underwater. Lindsey Swierk hide caption

Meet the scuba diving lizards breathing by bubble

September 20, 2024 • What's scaly, striped and breathes underwater like a scuba diver? Water anoles! These lizards can form a bubble over their head to support breathing underwater. They're found in the tropical forests of southern Costa Rica.

Garbage is unloaded into the Pine Tree Acres Landfill in Lenox Township, Mich., on July 28, 2022. State bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective, researchers found. Paul Sancya/AP hide caption

State bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective, study finds

September 15, 2024 • Much of the food supply in the U.S. goes uneaten, which contributes to climate change. Some states have tried to cut food waste in landfills, but their efforts have fallen short, researchers found.

Images taken from Dickson fjord show before (August 2023) and after (September 2023) photos of the mountain peak and glacier where a large landslide triggered a tsunami. Søren Rysgaard hide caption

A landslide linked to climate change ‘rang’ the Earth for 9 days, researchers say

September 13, 2024 • The scale of the geological event is like something from prehistoric times, with a tsunami 200 meters--656 feet--in height. But it happened last year. Researchers warn that similar events may reoccur.

Can dogs understand the meaning of words? Scientists are trying to figure it out

September 6, 2024 • Last year, a dog named Bunny went viral on TikTok for pressing buttons with words on them to "communicate" with her owner. But can dogs even understand those words on a soundboard in the first place? A new study in the journal PLOS One seeks answers. Host Regina G. Barber and producer Rachel Carlson break down that story and more of the week's news with the help of All Things Considered's Ari Shapiro.

Aging and Alzheimer's leave the brain starved of energy. Now scientists think they've found a way to aid the brain's metabolism — in mice. PM Images/Getty Images hide caption

Shots - Health News

This metabolic brain boost revives memory in alzheimer’s mice.

September 2, 2024 • An experimental cancer drug that helps the brain turn glucose into energy was able to reverse memory loss in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

A drug that restores brain metabolism could help treat Alzheimer's

A squat lobster in the genus Sternostylus, thought to be a newly identified species, was photographed along the Nazca Ridge off the coast of Chile. ROV SuBastian/Schmidt Ocean Institute hide caption

A newly mapped underwater mountain could be home to 20 new species

August 30, 2024 • Researchers who led the 28-day expedition along the nearly 2-mile tall seamount hope the discoveries made will inform future policies safeguarding the understudied, high-seas region.

Corn rootworm is known as the 'billion dollar bug' for how much damage it causes to corn crops in the United States. Researcher Emily Bick is tackling the problem by eavesdropping on this and other insects. Lina Tran hide caption

How listening to the sounds of insects can help detect agricultural pests

August 30, 2024 • From Indonesia to Wisconsin, farmers all over the world struggle with a huge problem: pests. On top of that, it's tough for farmers to identify where exactly they have the pests and when. Reporter Lina Tran from NPR member station WUWM in Milwaukee joins host Emily Kwong to tell the story of how researchers in the Midwest are inventing new forms of pest detection that involve eavesdropping on the world of insects. Plus, hear what aphid slurping sounds like.

A white-browed sparrow weaver inspects a roost under construction, after just receiving some grass brought by another member of its group. Maria Cristina Tello-Ramos hide caption

When birds build nests, they're also building a culture

August 29, 2024 • Nest-building isn’t just instinct. Birds can learn from others, letting groups within one species develop their own distinctive nest-building traditions.

Shells, composed mostly of invasive zebra mussels pile up at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan. The Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Species Control and Prevention Act of 1990 and the United States Geological Survey's Nonindigenous Aquatic Species database were created in response to this mussel. corfoto/Getty Images hide caption

Here's what's missing from the invasive species narrative

August 28, 2024 • At first glance, the whole narrative of aquatic invasive species may seem straightforward: A bad non-native species comes into a new ecosystem and overruns good native species. But the truth? It's a little more complicated. To tear down everything we thought we knew about invasive species and construct a more nuanced picture, host Emily Kwong talks to experts Ian Pfingsten, who works on the United States Geological Survey's Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database, and Nicholas Reo, a Canada Excellence Research Chair in Coastal Relationalities and Regeneration.

Many people get into their phones when they're bored, then scroll through social media in the hopes of alleviating that boredom. But new research suggests that swiping from video to video might increase boredom, not alleviate it. Tippapatt/Getty Images hide caption

Scrolling might make you MORE bored, not less

August 23, 2024 • Have you ever scrolled through a TikTok without finishing it? Switched between YouTube videos halfway through one or the other? Pressed "fast forward" on a Netflix episode that just wasn't holding your interest? That habit is called "digital switching" — and it might be causing the exact thing you're trying to avoid: boredom. Emily and Regina break that and more of the week's news down with the help of All Things Considered 's Ailsa Chang.

Invasive cane toads like this one have fanned out across Australia, killing numerous predators in their wake, including freshwater crocodiles. Joshua Prieto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images hide caption

To save wild crocodiles in Australia, scientists gave them food poisoning

August 16, 2024 • Freshwater crocodiles die every year in Australia from eating poisonous cane toads that humans introduced to the continent. Now scientists have found a way to teach the crocs to avoid the toxic toads.

Saving freshwater crocodiles — by teaching them to not eat poisonous toads

Conservation biologist Gliselle Marin carefully untangles a bat from a net in Belize during the annual Bat-a-thon. Her fanny pack is decorated with printed bats. Luis Echeverría for NPR hide caption

Goats and Soda

This scientist has a bat tat and earrings. she says there's a lot to learn from bats.

August 12, 2024 • Gliselle Marin joins the “Bat-a-thon,” a group of 80-some bat researchers who converge on Belize each year to study these winged mammals.

A scientist in Belize hopes bats can galvanize locals to protect their forests

Researchers glued cameras and tracking instruments to small pieces of neoprene, that they then glued to the fur of the sea lions Nathan Angelakis hide caption

Scientists attach video cameras to sea lions to map the ocean floor

August 9, 2024 • How do you study unmapped areas of the ocean and identify critical habitat for an endangered species? You include the study animal in the scientific process! Researchers from the University of Adelaide fitted endangered Australian sea lions with cameras and tracking devices to better understand where they spent their time. The information could help scientists protect critical sea lion habitat and could give researchers a new tool for mapping the ocean.

"Everything that we are as human beings is in our brain," Dr. Theodore Schwartz says. Brian Marcus /Penguin Randomhouse hide caption

Health Care

For this brain surgeon, the operating room is 'the ultimate in mindful meditation'.

August 5, 2024 • Dr. Theodore Schwartz has been treating neurological illnesses for nearly 30 years. He says being a brain surgeon requires steady hands — and a strong bladder. His new book is Gray Matters.

New blood tests that help detect Alzheimer's disease are opening up a new era in diagnosis and treatment, doctors say. Marcus Brandt/picture alliance/Getty Images hide caption

New blood tests can help diagnose Alzheimer's. Are doctors ready for what's next?

August 2, 2024 • A new generation of blood tests can help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. But many doctors don’t yet know how to use them.

Alzheimer's blood tests

Some researchers say the African coral tree has a racial slur embedded in its name. This month, scientists at an international meeting voted to have that epithet removed. tree-species/Flickr hide caption

Some plant names can be racist. Scientists are looking to rename them

July 31, 2024 • An international group of researchers has voted to modify the scientific names of more than 200 plant species whose names carry a derogatory word.

Researchers are revising botanical names to address troubling connotations

A key protein called Reelin may help stave off Alzheimer's disease, according to a growing body of research. GSO Images/The Image Bank/Getty Images hide caption

A protein called Reelin keeps popping up in brains that resist aging and Alzheimer’s

July 29, 2024 • Early in life, the protein Reelin helps assemble the brain. Later on, it appears to protect the organ from Alzheimer’s and other threats to memory and thinking.

Alzheimer's resilience

There are over eight hundred species of leeches, but researchers estimate that only ten percent of all leeches are terrestrial. Auscape/Contributor/Getty Images hide caption

We hate to tell you this, but there are leeches that can jump

July 29, 2024 • Generally, we at Short Wave are open-minded to the creepies and the crawlies, but even we must admit that leeches are already the stuff of nightmares. They lurk in water. They drink blood. There are over 800 different species of them. And now, as scientists have confirmed ... at least some of them can jump!

Two chimpanzees groom each other — a behavior that can involve several gestures. Anup Shah/Getty Images hide caption

What chimpanzee gestures reveal about human communication

July 26, 2024 • Chimpanzees are humans' closest living relatives. But does much of their communication resembles ours? According to a new study published earlier this week in the journal Current Biology , chimpanzees gesture back-and-forth in a similar way to how humans take turns speaking. The research presents an intriguing possibility that this style of communication may have evolved before humans split off from great apes, and tells researchers more about how turn-taking evolved.

Project RattleCam lets people observe rattlesnakes with a live webcam. Scott Boback hide caption

Watch a livestream of Colorado’s ‘mega den’ of pregnant rattlesnakes

July 24, 2024 • On a rocky hillside in Colorado is a “mega den” of hundreds of rattlesnakes — along with cameras livestreaming the whole thing.

 Pregnant Rattlesnakes Webcam

Glyptodonts were giant, armadillo-like shelled mammals that went extinct about 10,000 years ago. A study reveals that cut marks on a glyptodont fossil in South America could have been made by humans a little over 20,000 years ago. Daniel Eskridge/Stocktrek Images/Science Source hide caption

When did humans get to South America? This giant shelled mammal fossil may hold clues

July 23, 2024 • A fossil of an armadillo-like mammal appears to bear cut marks from butchering by humans, suggesting people were living in South America at least 20,000 years ago, even earlier than once thought.

Ancient Armadillos

Once completed, India's National River Linking Project will transfer an estimated 200 billion cubic meters of water around the country each year. STRDEL / Stringer/Getty Images hide caption

India's plan to reroute rivers could have unintended consequences on rainfall

July 19, 2024 • More than a hundred years ago, a British engineer proposed linking two rivers in India to better irrigate the area and cheaply move goods. The link never happened, but the idea survived. Today, due to extreme flooding in some parts of the country mirrored by debilitating drought in others, India's National Water Development Agency plans to dig thirty links between rivers across the country. It's the largest project of its kind and will take decades to complete. But scientists are worried what moving that much water could do to the land, the people — and even the weather. Host Emily Kwong talks to journalist Sushmita Pathak about her recent story on the project.

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Collection  12 March 2020

Top 50 Life and Biological Sciences Articles

We are pleased to share with you the 50 most read Nature Communications  articles* in life and biological sciences published in 2019. Featuring authors from around the world, these papers highlight valuable research from an international community.

Browse all Top 50 subject area collections here .

*Based on data from Google Analytics, covering January-December 2019 (data has been normalised to account for articles published later in the year)

Genome-wide analysis identifies molecular systems and 149 genetic loci associated with income

Household income is used as a marker of socioeconomic position, a trait that is associated with better physical and mental health. Here, Hill et al. report a genome-wide association study for household income in the UK and explore its relationship with intelligence in post-GWAS analyses including Mendelian randomization.

• W. David Hill
• Neil M. Davies
• Ian J. Deary

A 5700 year-old human genome and oral microbiome from chewed birch pitch

Birch pitch is thought to have been used in prehistoric times as hafting material or antiseptic and tooth imprints suggest that it was chewed. Here, the authors report a 5,700 year-old piece of chewed birch pitch from Denmark from which they successfully recovered a complete ancient human genome and oral microbiome DNA.

• Theis Z. T. Jensen
• Jonas Niemann
• Hannes Schroeder

A short translational ramp determines the efficiency of protein synthesis

Several factors contribute to the efficiency of protein expression. Here the authors show that the identity of amino acids encoded by codons at position 3–5 significantly impact translation efficiency and protein expression levels.

• Manasvi Verma
• Junhong Choi
• Sergej Djuranovic

Early coauthorship with top scientists predicts success in academic careers

By examining publication records of scientists from four disciplines, the authors show that coauthoring a paper with a top-cited scientist early in one's career predicts lasting increases in career success, especially for researchers affiliated with less prestigious institutions.

• Tomaso Aste
• Giacomo Livan

Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India

Remains of several hundred humans are scattered around Roopkund Lake, situated over 5,000 meters above sea level in the Himalayan Mountains. Here the authors analyze genome-wide data from 38 skeletons and find 3 clusters with different ancestries and dates, showing the people were desposited in multiple catastrophic events.

• Éadaoin Harney
• Ayushi Nayak

Ketamine can reduce harmful drinking by pharmacologically rewriting drinking memories

Memories linking environmental cues to alcohol reward are involved in the development and maintenance of heavy drinking. Here, the authors show that a single dose of ketamine, given after retrieval of alcohol-reward memories, disrupts the reconsolidation of these memories and reduces drinking in humans.

• Ravi K. Das
• Sunjeev K. Kamboj

Sequential LASER ART and CRISPR Treatments Eliminate HIV-1 in a Subset of Infected Humanized Mice

Here, the authors show that sequential treatment with long-acting slow-effective release ART and AAV9- based delivery of CRISPR-Cas9 results in undetectable levels of virus and integrated DNA in a subset of humanized HIV-1 infected mice. This proof-of-concept study suggests that HIV-1 elimination is possible.

• Prasanta K. Dash
• Rafal Kaminski
• Howard E. Gendelman

XX sex chromosome complement promotes atherosclerosis in mice

Men and women differ in their risk of developing coronary artery disease, in part due to differences in their levels of sex hormones. Here, AlSiraj et al. show that the XX sex genotype regulates lipid metabolism and promotes atherosclerosis independently of sex hormones in mice.

• Yasir AlSiraj
• Lisa A. Cassis

Early-career setback and future career impact

Little is known about the long-term effects of early-career setback. Here, the authors compare junior scientists who were awarded a NIH grant to those with similar track records, who were not, and find that individuals with the early setback systematically performed better in the longer term.

• Benjamin F. Jones
• Dashun Wang

Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle

How do liberals and conservatives differ in their expression of compassion and moral concern? The authors show that conservatives tend to express concern toward smaller, more well-defined, and less permeable social circles, while liberals express concern toward larger, less well-defined, and more permeable social circles.

• Jesse Graham

A metabolic profile of all-cause mortality risk identified in an observational study of 44,168 individuals

Biomarkers that predict mortality are of interest for clinical as well as research applications. Here, the authors analyze metabolomics data from 44,168 individuals and identify key metabolites independently associated with all-cause mortality risk.

• Joris Deelen
• Johannes Kettunen
• P. Eline Slagboom

New insects feeding on dinosaur feathers in mid-Cretaceous amber

Numerous feathered dinosaurs and early birds have been discovered from the Jurassic and Cretaceous, but the early evolution of feather-feeding insects is not clear. Here, Gao et al. describe a new family of ectoparasitic insects from 10 specimens found associated with feathers in mid-Cretaceous amber.

• Taiping Gao
• Xiangchu Yin

Acoustic enrichment can enhance fish community development on degraded coral reef habitat

Healthy coral reefs have an acoustic signature known to be attractive to coral and fish larvae during settlement. Here the authors use playback experiments in the field to show that healthy reef sounds can increase recruitment of juvenile fishes to degraded coral reef habitat, suggesting that acoustic playback could be used as a reef management strategy.

• Timothy A. C. Gordon
• Andrew N. Radford
• Stephen D. Simpson

Phagocytosis-like cell engulfment by a planctomycete bacterium

Phagocytosis is a typically eukaryotic feature that could be behind the origin of eukaryotic cells. Here, the authors describe a bacterium that can engulf other bacteria and small eukaryotic cells through a phagocytosis-like mechanism.

• Takashi Shiratori
• Shigekatsu Suzuki
• Ken-ichiro Ishida

Hippocampal clock regulates memory retrieval via Dopamine and PKA-induced GluA1 phosphorylation

The neural mechanisms that lead to a relative deficit in memory retrieval in the afternoon are unclear. Here, the authors show that the circadian - dependent transcription factor BMAL1 regulates retrieval through dopamine and glutamate receptor phosphorylation.

• Shunsuke Hasegawa
• Hotaka Fukushima
• Satoshi Kida

Agreement between two large pan-cancer CRISPR-Cas9 gene dependency data sets

Integrating independent large-scale pharmacogenomic screens can enable unprecedented characterization of genetic vulnerabilities in cancers. Here, the authors show that the two largest independent CRISPR-Cas9 gene-dependency screens are concordant, paving the way for joint analysis of the data sets.

• Joshua M. Dempster
• Clare Pacini
• Francesco Iorio

Phylogenomics of 10,575 genomes reveals evolutionary proximity between domains Bacteria and Archaea

The authors build a reference phylogeny of 10,575 evenly-sampled bacterial and archaeal genomes, based on 381 markers. The results indicate a remarkably closer evolutionary proximity between Archaea and Bacteria than previous estimates that used fewer “core” genes, such as the ribosomal proteins.

Pan-cancer molecular subtypes revealed by mass-spectrometry-based proteomic characterization of more than 500 human cancers

Mass-spectrometry-based profiling can be used to stratify tumours into molecular subtypes. Here, by classifying over 500 tumours, the authors show that this approach reveals proteomic subgroups which cut across tumour types.

• Fengju Chen
• Darshan S. Chandrashekar
• Chad J. Creighton

CRISPR-Switch regulates sgRNA activity by Cre recombination for sequential editing of two loci

Inducible genome editing systems often suffer from leakiness or reduced activity. Here the authors develop CRISPR-Switch, a Cre recombinase ON/OFF-controlled sgRNA cassette that allows consecutive editing of two loci.

• Krzysztof Chylinski
• Maria Hubmann
• Ulrich Elling

CRISPR-Cas3 induces broad and unidirectional genome editing in human cells

Class 1 CRISPR systems are not as developed for genome editing as Class 2 systems are. Here the authors show that Cas3 can be used to generate functional knockouts and knock-ins, as well as Cas3-mediated exon-skipping in DMD cells.

• Hiroyuki Morisaka
• Kazuto Yoshimi
• Tomoji Mashimo

Genetic evidence for assortative mating on alcohol consumption in the UK Biobank

From observational studies, alcohol consumption behaviours are known to be correlated in spouses. Here, Howe et al. use partners’ genotypic information in a Mendelian randomization framework and show that a SNP in the ADH1B gene associates with partner’s alcohol consumption, suggesting that alcohol consumption affects mate choice.

• Laurence J. Howe
• Daniel J. Lawson
• Gibran Hemani

The autophagy receptor p62/SQST-1 promotes proteostasis and longevity in C. elegans by inducing autophagy

While the cellular recycling process autophagy has been linked to aging, the impact of selective autophagy on lifespan remains unclear. Here Kumsta et al. show that the autophagy receptor p62/SQSTM1 is required for hormetic benefits and p62/SQSTM1 overexpression is sufficient to extend C. elegans lifespan and improve proteostasis.

• Caroline Kumsta
• Jessica T. Chang
• Malene Hansen

The coincidence of ecological opportunity with hybridization explains rapid adaptive radiation in Lake Mweru cichlid fishes

Recent studies have suggested that hybridization can facilitate adaptive radiations. Here, the authors show that opportunity for hybridization differentiates Lake Mweru, where cichlids radiated, and Lake Bangweulu, where cichlids did not radiate despite ecological opportunity in both lakes.

• Joana I. Meier
• Rike B. Stelkens
• Ole Seehausen

Flagellin-elicited adaptive immunity suppresses flagellated microbiota and vaccinates against chronic inflammatory diseases

Gut microbiota alterations, including enrichment of flagellated bacteria, are associated with metabolic syndrome and chronic inflammatory diseases. Here, Tran et al. show, in mice, that elicitation of mucosal anti-flagellin antibodies protects against experimental colitis and ameliorates diet-induced obesity.

• Hao Q. Tran
• Ruth E. Ley
• Benoit Chassaing

Possible role of L-form switching in recurrent urinary tract infection

The reservoir for recurrent urinary tract infection in humans is unclear. Here, Mickiewicz et al. detect cell-wall deficient (L-form) E. coli in fresh urine from patients, and show that the isolated bacteria readily switch between walled and L-form states.

• Katarzyna M. Mickiewicz
• Yoshikazu Kawai
• Jeff Errington

Dual microglia effects on blood brain barrier permeability induced by systemic inflammation

Although it is known that microglia respond to injury and systemic disease in the brain, it is unclear if they modulate blood–brain barrier (BBB) integrity, which is critical for regulating neuroinflammatory responses. Here authors demonstrate that microglia respond to inflammation by migrating towards and accumulating around cerebral vessels, where they initially maintain BBB integrity via expression of the tight-junction protein Claudin-5 before switching, during sustained inflammation, to phagocytically remove astrocytic end-feet resulting in impaired BBB function

• Koichiro Haruwaka
• Ako Ikegami
• Hiroaki Wake

Mice with hyper-long telomeres show less metabolic aging and longer lifespans

Telomere shortening is associated with aging. Here the authors analyze mice with hyperlong telomeres and demonstrate that longer telomeres than normal have beneficial effects such as delayed metabolic aging, increased longevity and less incidence of cancer.

• Miguel A. Muñoz-Lorente
• Alba C. Cano-Martin
• Maria A. Blasco

Extracellular matrix hydrogel derived from decellularized tissues enables endodermal organoid culture

Organoid cultures have been developed from multiple tissues, opening new possibilities for regenerative medicine. Here the authors demonstrate the derivation of GMP-compliant hydrogels from decellularized porcine small intestine which support formation and growth of human gastric, liver, pancreatic and small intestinal organoids.

• Giovanni Giuseppe Giobbe
• Claire Crowley
• Paolo De Coppi

Engineered E. coli Nissle 1917 for the delivery of matrix-tethered therapeutic domains to the gut

Anti-inflammatory treatments for gastrointestinal diseases can often have detrimental side effects. Here the authors engineer E. coli Nissle 1917 to create a fibrous matrix that has a protective effect in DSS-induced colitis mice.

• Pichet Praveschotinunt
• Anna M. Duraj-Thatte
• Neel S. Joshi

Ambient black carbon particles reach the fetal side of human placenta

Exposure to air pollution during pregnancy has been associated with impaired birth outcomes. Here, Bové et al. report evidence of black carbon particle deposition on the fetal side of human placentae, including at early stages of pregnancy, suggesting air pollution could affect birth outcome through direct effects on the fetus.

• Hannelore Bové
• Eva Bongaerts
• Tim S. Nawrot

Real-time decoding of question-and-answer speech dialogue using human cortical activity

Speech neuroprosthetic devices should be capable of restoring a patient’s ability to participate in interactive dialogue. Here, the authors demonstrate that the context of a verbal exchange can be used to enhance neural decoder performance in real time.

• David A. Moses
• Matthew K. Leonard
• Edward F. Chang

In-cell identification and measurement of RNA-protein interactions

RNA-interacting proteome can be identified by RNA affinity purification followed by mass spectrometry. Here the authors developed a different RNA-centric technology that combines high-throughput immunoprecipitation of RNA binding proteins and luciferase-based detection of their interaction with the RNA.

• Antoine Graindorge
• Inês Pinheiro
• Alena Shkumatava

A bacterial gene-drive system efficiently edits and inactivates a high copy number antibiotic resistance locus

Genedrives bias the inheritance of alleles in diploid organisms. Here, the authors develop a gene-drive analogous system for bacteria, selectively editing and clearing plasmids.

• J. Andrés Valderrama
• Surashree S. Kulkarni

Flavonoid intake is associated with lower mortality in the Danish Diet Cancer and Health Cohort

The studies showing health benefits of flavonoids and their impact on cancer mortality are incomplete. Here, the authors perform a prospective cohort study in Danish participants and demonstrate an inverse association between regular flavonoid intake and both cardiovascular and cancer related mortality.

• Nicola P. Bondonno
• Frederik Dalgaard
• Jonathan M. Hodgson

Senescent cell turnover slows with age providing an explanation for the Gompertz law

One of the underlying causes of aging is the accumulation of senescent cells, but their turnover rates and dynamics during ageing are unknown. Here the authors measure and model senescent cell production and removal and explore implications for mortality.

• Amit Agrawal

Optimizing agent behavior over long time scales by transporting value

People are able to mentally time travel to distant memories and reflect on the consequences of those past events. Here, the authors show how a mechanism that connects learning from delayed rewards with memory retrieval can enable AI agents to discover links between past events to help decide better courses of action in the future.

• Chia-Chun Hung
• Timothy Lillicrap

Mutant p53 drives clonal hematopoiesis through modulating epigenetic pathway

Ageing is associated with clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), which is linked to increased risks of hematological malignancies. Here the authors uncover an epigenetic mechanism through which mutant p53 drives clonal hematopoiesis through interaction with EZH2.

A systematic evaluation of single cell RNA-seq analysis pipelines

There has been a rapid rise in single cell RNA-seq methods and associated pipelines. Here the authors use simulated data to systematically evaluate the performance of 3000 possible pipelines to derive recommendations for data processing and analysis of different types of scRNA-seq experiments.

• Beate Vieth
• Swati Parekh
• Ines Hellmann

Cryo-EM structure and polymorphism of Aβ amyloid fibrils purified from Alzheimer’s brain tissue

Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by the deposition of Aβ amyloid fibrils and tau protein neurofibrillary tangles. Here the authors use cryo-EM to structurally characterise brain derived Aβ amyloid fibrils and find that they are polymorphic and right-hand twisted, which differs from in vitro generated Aβ fibrils.

• Marius Kollmer
• William Close
• Marcus Fändrich

Droplet Tn-Seq combines microfluidics with Tn-Seq for identifying complex single-cell phenotypes

Culturing transposon-mutant libraries in pools can mask complex phenotypes. Here the authors present microfluidics mediated droplet Tn-Seq, which encapsulates individual mutants, promotes isolated growth and enables cell-cell interaction analyses.

• Derek Thibault
• Paul A. Jensen
• Tim van Opijnen

An artificial metalloenzyme biosensor can detect ethylene gas in fruits and Arabidopsis leaves

Existing methods to detect ethylene in plant tissue typically require gas chromatography or use ethylene-dependent gene expression as a proxy. Here Vong et al . show that an artificial metalloenzyme-based ethylene probe can be used to detect ethylene in plants with improved spatiotemporal resolution.

• Kenward Vong
• Katsunori Tanaka

Artificially cloaked viral nanovaccine for cancer immunotherapy

Cancer therapy using oncolytic virus has shown pre-clinical and clinical efficacy. Here, the authors report ExtraCRAd, an oncolytic virus cloaked with tumour cell membrane and report its therapeutic effects in vitro and in vivo in multiple mouse tumour models.

• Manlio Fusciello
• Flavia Fontana
• Vincenzo Cerullo

A transposable element insertion is associated with an alternative life history strategy

Tradeoffs are central to life history theory and evolutionary biology, yet almost nothing is known about their mechanistic basis. Here the authors characterize one such mechanism and find a transposable element insertion is associated with the switch between alternative life history strategies.

• Alyssa Woronik
• Kalle Tunström
• Christopher W. Wheat

Patterns of genetic differentiation and the footprints of historical migrations in the Iberian Peninsula

The Iberian Peninsula has a complex history. Here, the authors analyse the genetic structure of the modern Iberian population at fine scale, revealing historical population movements associated with the time of Muslim rule.

• Clare Bycroft
• Ceres Fernandez-Rozadilla
• Simon Myers

Single-cell transcriptomics of human T cells reveals tissue and activation signatures in health and disease

Immune cells are shaped by the tissue environment, yet the states of healthy human T cells are mainly studied in the blood. Here, the authors perform single cell RNA-seq of T cells from tissues and blood of healthy donors and show its utility as a reference map for comparison of human T cell states in disease.

• Peter A. Szabo
• Hanna Mendes Levitin
• Peter A. Sims

Genomic risk score offers predictive performance comparable to clinical risk factors for ischaemic stroke

Stroke risk is influenced by genetic and lifestyle factors and previously a genomic risk score (GRS) for stroke was proposed, albeit with limited predictive power. Here, Abraham et al. develop a metaGRS that is composed of several stroke-related GRSs and demonstrate improved predictive power compared with individual GRS or classic risk factors.

• Gad Abraham
• Rainer Malik
• Martin Dichgans

Mitochondrial oxidative capacity and NAD + biosynthesis are reduced in human sarcopenia across ethnicities

Sarcopenia is the loss of muscle mass and strength associated with physical disability during ageing. Here, the authors analyse muscle biopsies from 119 patients with sarcopenia and age-matched controls of different ethnic groups and find transcriptional signatures indicating mitochondrial dysfunction, associated with reduced mitochondria numbers and lower NAD +  levels in older individuals with sarcopenia.

• Eugenia Migliavacca
• Stacey K. H. Tay
• Jerome N. Feige

NAD + augmentation restores mitophagy and limits accelerated aging in Werner syndrome

The molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial dysfunction in the premature ageing Werner syndrome were elusive. Here the authors show that NAD + depletion-induced impaired mitophagy contributes to this phenomenon, shedding light on potential therapeutics.

• Evandro F. Fang
• Vilhelm A. Bohr

Novel approach reveals genomic landscapes of single-strand DNA breaks with nucleotide resolution in human cells

Single strand breaks represent the most common form of DNA damage yet no methods to map them in a genome-wide fashion at single nucleotide resolution exist. Here the authors develop such a method and apply to uncover patterns of single-strand DNA “breakome” in different biological conditions.

• Lorena Salazar-García
• Philipp Kapranov

Evaluation of 16S rRNA gene sequencing for species and strain-level microbiome analysis

Here, the authors explore the potential of the 16S gene for discriminating bacterial taxa and show that full-length sequencing combined with appropriate clustering of intragenomic sequence variation can provide accurate representation of bacterial species in microbiome datasets.

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Evolution of Clinical Research: A History Before and Beyond James Lind

Dr arun bhatt.

President, Clininvent Research Pvt Ltd, Mumbai, India

The evolution of clinical research traverses a long and fascinating journey. From the first recorded trial of legumes in biblical times to the first randomized controlled of trial of streptomycin in 1946, the history of clinical trial covers a wide variety of challenges - scientific, ethical and regulatory. The famous 1747 scurvy trial conducted by James Lind contained most elements of a controlled trial. The UK Medical Research Council's (MRC) trial of patulin for common cold in 1943 was the first double blind controlled trial. This paved the way for the first randomized control trial of streptomycin in pulmonary tuberculosis carried out in 1946 by MRC of the UK. This landmark trial was a model of meticulousness in design and implementation, with systematic enrolment criteria and data collection compared with the ad hoc nature of other contemporary research. Over the years, as the discipline of controlled trials grew in sophistication and influence, the streptomycin trial continues to be referred to as ground breaking. The ethical advances in human protection include several milestones - Nuremberg Code, Declaration of Helsinki, Belmont Report, and 1996, International Conference on Harmonization Good Clinical Practice guidance. In parallel to ethical guidelines, clinical trials started to become embodied in regulation as government authorities began recognizing a need for controlling medical therapies in the early 20th century. As the scientific advances continue to occur, there will be new ethical and regulatory challenges requiring dynamic updates in ethical and legal framework of clinical trials.

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.” - Aldous Huxley

The evolution of clinical research traverses a long and fascinating journey. The recorded history of clinical trials goes back to the biblical descriptions in 500 BC. The journey moves from dietary therapy – legumes and lemons – to drugs. After basic approach of clinical trial was described in 18th century, the efforts were made to refine the design and statistical aspects. These were followed by changes in regulatory and ethics milieu. This article captures the major milestones in the evolution of clinical trials.

562 BC - 1537: Pre-James Lind Era

The world's first clinical trial is recorded in the “Book of Daniel” in The Bible. 1 This experiment resembling a clinical trial was not conducted by a medical, but by King Nebuchadnezzar a resourceful military leader. 1 During his rule in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar ordered his people to eat only meat and drink only wine, a diet he believed would keep them in sound physical condition. 1 But several young men of royal blood, who preferred to eat vegetables, objected. The king allowed these rebels to follow a diet of legumes and water — but only for 10 days. When Nebuchadnezzar's experiment ended, the vegetarians appeared better nourished than the meat-eaters, so the king permitted the legume lovers to continue their diet. 1 This probably was the one of the first times in evolution of human species that an open uncontrolled human experiment guided a decision about public health.

Avicenna (1025 AD) in his encyclopedic ‘Canon of Medicine’ describes some interesting rules for the testing of drugs. 2 He suggests that in the clinical trial a remedy should be used in its natural state in disease without complications. He recommends that two cases of contrary types be studied and that study be made of the time of action and of the reproducibility of the effects. 2 These rules suggest a contemporary approach for clinical trials. However, there seems to be no record of the application of these principles in practice.

The first clinical trial of a novel therapy was conducted accidentally by the famous surgeon Ambroise Pare in 1537. 1 , 3 In 1537 while serving with the Mareschal de Motegni he was responsible for the treatment of the battlefield wounded soldiers. As the number of wounded was high and the supply of conventional treatment – oil was not adequate to treat all the wounded, he had to resort to unconventional treatment. He describes,' at length my oil lacked and I was constrained to apply in its place a digestive made of yolks of eggs, oil of roses and turpentine. That night I could not sleep at any ease, fearing that by lack of cauterization I would find the wounded upon which I had not used the said oil dead from the poison. I raised myself early to visit them, when beyond my hope I found those to whom I had applied the digestive medicament feeling but little pain, their wounds neither swollen nor inflamed, and having slept through the night. The others to whom I had applied the boiling oil were feverish with much pain and swelling about their wounds. Then I determined never again to burn thus so cruelly the poor wounded by arquebuses’. 2 However, it would take another 200 years before a planned controlled trial would be organized.

1747: James Lind and Scurvy Trial

James Lind is considered the first physician to have conducted a controlled clinical trial of the modern era. 1 – 4 Dr Lind (1716-94), whilst working as a surgeon on a ship, was appalled by the high mortality of scurvy amongst the sailors. He planned a comparative trial of the most promising cure for scurvy. 1 – 4 His vivid description of the trial covers the essential elements of a controlled trial.

Lind describes“”On the 20th of May 1747, I selected twelve patients in the scurvy, on board the Salisbury at sea. Their cases were as similar as I could have them. They all in general had putrid gums, the spots and lassitude, with weakness of the knees. They lay together in one place, being a proper apartment for the sick in the fore-hold; and had one diet common to all, viz. water gruel sweetened with sugar in the morning; fresh mutton-broth often times for dinner; at other times light puddings, boiled biscuit with sugar, etc., and for supper, barley and raisins, rice and currants, sago and wine or the like. Two were ordered each a quart of cyder a day. Two others took twenty-five drops of elixir vitriol three times a day … Two others took two spoonfuls of vinegar three times a day … Two of the worst patients were put on a course of sea-water … Two others had each two oranges and one lemon given them every day … The two remaining patients, took … an electary recommended by a hospital surgeon … The consequence was, that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of oranges and lemons; one of those who had taken them, being at the end of six days fit for duty … The other was the best recovered of any in his condition; and … was appointed to attend the rest of the sick. Next to the oranges, I thought the cyder had the best effects …” (Dr James Lind's “Treatise on Scurvy” published in Edinburgh in 1753)

Although the results were clear, Lind hesitated to recommend the use of oranges and lemons because they were too expensive. 3 It was nearly 50 years before the British Navy eventually made lemon juice a compulsory part of the seafarer's diet, and this was soon replaced by lime juice because it was cheaper.

Lind's Treatise of 1953, was written while he was resident in Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, contains not only his well known description of a controlled trial showing that oranges and lemons were dramatically better than the other treatments for the disease, but also a systematic review of previous literature on scurvy. 5

In 2003, Royal College of Physicians established The James Lind Library to commemorate 250 th anniversary of publication of Dr Lind's pioneering contribution “Treatise on Scurvy”. The James Lind Library ( www.jameslindlibrary.org ) was created to improve public and professional general knowledge about fair tests of treatments in healthcare and their history. 5 This library is a website ( www.jameslindlibrary.org ) that introduces visitors to the principles of fair tests of treatments, with a series of short, illustrated essays. In 2003, Scientific American awarded the Library a Sci/Tech web award. The publicity and popularity of the James Lind Library has made 20 May to be designated International Clinical Trials Day, because James Lind's celebrated controlled trial began on that day in 1747. 5

1800: Arrival of Placebo

It took another century before the emergence of another important mile stone in the history of modern clinical trial: the placebo. The word placebo first appeared in medical literature in the early 1800s. 1 Hooper's Medical Dictionary of 1811 defined it as “an epithet given to any medicine more to please than benefit the patient.” However, it was only in 1863 that United States physician Austin Flint planned the first clinical study comparing a dummy remedy to an active treatment. He treated 13 patients suffering from rheumatism with an herbal extract which was advised instead of an established remedy. In 1886, Flint described the study in his book A Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Medicine. “This was given regularly, and became well known in my wards as the ‘placeboic remedy’ for rheumatism. The favorable progress of the cases was such as to secure for the remedy generally the entire confidence of the patients.”

1943: The First Double blind Controlled Trial - Patulin for Common Cold

The Medical Research Council (MRC) UK carried out a trial in 1943-4 to investigate patulin treatment for (an extract of Penicillium patulinum) the common cold. 6 This was the first double blind comparative trial with concurrent controls in the general population in recent times. 6 It was one of the last trial with non-randomized or quasi-randomized allocation of subjects. 6 The MRC Patulin Clinical Trials Committee (1943) was chaired by Sir Harold Himsworth, and its statisticians were M Greenwood and W J Martin. This nationwide study enrolled over a thousand British office and factory workers suffering from colds. This was quite a challenging endeavor in wartime,

The study was rigorously controlled by keeping the physician and the patient blinded to the treatment. The treatment allocation was done using an alternation procedure. A nurse allocated the treatment in strict rotation in a separate room. The nurse filed the record counterfoil separately, and detached the code label for the appropriate bottle before asking the patient to visit the doctor. 6 The statisticians considered this an effective random concurrent allocation. .However, the outcome of the trial was disappointing as the analysis of trial data did not show any protective effect of patulin. 6

1946 First Randomized Curative Trial - The Randomized Controlled Trial of Streptomycin

The idea of randomization was introduced in 1923. However, the first randomized control trial of streptomycin in pulmonary tuberculosis was carried out in 1946 by MRC of the UK. 6 , 7 The MRC Streptomycin in Tuberculosis Trials Committee (1946) was chaired by Sir Geoffrey Marshall, and the statistician was Sir Austin Bradford Hill and Philip Hart, who later directed the MRC's tuberculosis research unit, served as secretary. Marc Daniels, as the “registrar” coordinated the clinicians at the participating hospitals. The trial began in 1947. As the amount of streptomycin available from US was limited, it was ethically acceptable for the control subjects to be untreated by the drug—a statistician's dream. 6 This trial was a model of meticulousness in design and implementation, with systematic enrolment criteria and data collection compared with the ad hoc nature of other contemporary research 8 A key advantage of Dr Hill's randomization scheme over alternation procedure was “allocation concealment” at the time patients were enrolled in the trial. Another significant feature of the trial was the use of objective measures such as interpretation of x-rays by experts who were blinded to the patient's treatment assignment. 8

Sir Bradford Hill had formed his allocation ideas over several years (with randomisation replacing alternation in order to better conceal the allocation schedule), but had only tried them out in disease prevention. Dr Hill instituted randomization – a new statistical process which has been described in detail in the landmark BMJ paper of 1948. 7

“Determination of whether a patient would be treated by streptomycin and bed-rest (S case) or by bed-rest alone (C case) was made by reference to a statistical series based on random sampling numbers drawn up for each sex at each centre by Professor Bradford Hill; the details of the series were unknown to any of the investigators or to the co--coordinator and were contained in a set of sealed envelopes, each bearing on the outside only the name of the hospital and a number. After acceptance of a patient by the panel, and before admission to the streptomycin centre, the appropriate numbered envelope was opened at the central office; the card inside told if the patient was to be an S or a C case, and this information was then given to the medical officer of the centre. Patients were not told before admission that they were to get special treatment. C patients did not know throughout their stay in hospital that they were control patients in a special study; they were in fact treated as they would have been in the past, the sole difference being that they had been admitted to the centre more rapidly than was normal. Usually they were not in the same wards as S patients, but the same regime was maintained

Sir Bradford Hill had been anxious that physicians would be unwilling to give up the doctrine of anecdotal experience. However, the trial quickly became a model of design and implementation and gave a boost to Dr Hill's views and subsequent teaching, and resulted, after some years, in the present virtually universal use of randomised allocation in clinical trials. 6 The greatest influence of this trial lay in its methods which have affected virtually every area of clinical medicine. 8 Over the years, as the discipline of controlled trials grew in sophistication and influence, the streptomycin trial continues to be referred to as ground breaking. 8

Evolution of Ethical and Regulatory Framework

The ethical framework for human subject protection has its origins in the ancient Hippocratic Oath, which specified a prime duty of a physician – to avoid harming the patient. However, this oath was not much respected in human experimentation and most advances in protection for human subjects have been a response to human abuses e.g. World War II experiments.

The first International Guidance on the ethics of medical research involving subjects – the Nuremberg Code was formulated in 1947. Although informed consent for participation in research was described in 1900, the Nuremberg Code highlighted the essentiality of voluntariness of this consent. 9 In 1948, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations) expressed concern about rights of human beings being subjected to involuntary maltreatment. 9 The brush with thalidomide tragedy helped the U.S. pass the 1962 Kefauver-Harris amendments, which strengthened federal oversight of drug testing and included a requirement for informed consent. 10

In 1964 at Helsinki, the World Medical Association articulated general principles and specific guidelines on use of human subjects in medical research, known as the Helsinki Declaration. The Helsinki Declaration has been undergoing changes every few years the last one being in 2008. However, the use of placebo and post-trial access continue to be debatable issues.

In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights specifically stated, ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. In particular, no one shall be subjected without his consent to medical or scientific treatment.’ 9 Dr. Henry Beecher's 1966 study of abuses and the discovery of human exploitation of Tuskegee study in the 1970s reinforced the call for tighter regulation of government funded human research. 10 The US National Research Act of 1974 and Belmont Report of 1979 were major efforts in shaping ethics of human experimentation. In 1996, International Conference on Harmonization published Good Clinical Practice, which has become the universal standard for ethical conduct of clinical trials.

In parallel to ethical guidelines, clinical trials started to become embodied in regulation as government authorities began recognizing a need for controlling medical therapies in the early 20th century. The FDA was founded in 1862 as a scientific institution and became a law enforcement organization after the US Congress passed the Food and Drugs Act in 1906. After that, legislation progressively demanded greater accountability for marketing food and drugs and the need for testing drugs in clinical trials increased. The regulatory and ethical milieu will continue to evolve as new scientific disciplines and technologies become part of drug development.

Evolution of Clinical Trials in India

India has recently been recognized as an attractive country for clinical trials. But the country's journey in clinical research field has a long history. India has a rich heritage of traditional medicine – Ayurveda. The classic ayurvedic texts contain detailed observations on diseases and in-depth guidance on remedies. It is likely that these descriptions are based on direct observations made by the ancient ayurveda experts. However, there is no recorded documentation in the ancient texts of any clinical experiments. Hence, one has to fall back on current history of medical research in India.

The major historic milestones of the Indian Council of Medical Research reflect, in many ways, the growth and development of medical research in the country over the last nine decades. First meeting of the Governing Body of the Indian Research Fund Association (IRFA) was held on November 15, 1911 at the Plague Laboratory, Bombay, under the Chairmanship of Sir Harcourt Butler. 11 At the 2nd meeting of the Governing Body in 1912, a historic decision was taken to start a journal for Indian Medical research. Between 1918--20, several projects on beriberi, malaria, kala azar and indigenous drugs were initiated. In 1945, a Clinical Research Unit – the first research unit of IRFA attached to a medical institution- was established at the Indian Cancer Research Centre, Bombay. In 1949, IRFA was redesignated as the Indian Council of Medical Research. Over next 60 years, ICMR established many national research centers in the fields of nutrition, tuberculosis, leprosy, viral disease, cholera, enteric disease, reproductive disorders, toxicology, cancer, traditional medicine, gas disaster, genetics, AIDS etc.

The Central Ethical Committee of ICMR on Human Research constituted under the Chairmanship of Hon'ble Justice (Retired) M.N. Venkatachaliah held its first meeting on September 10, 1996. Several subcommittees were constituted to consider ethical issues in specific areas e.g., Epidemiological Research; Clinical Evaluation of Products to be used on Humans; Organ Transplantation; Human Genetics, etc. The committee released Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Participants in 2000 which were revised in 2006. 9

Schedule Y of Drugs and Cosmetics Act came into force in 1988 and established the regulatory guidelines for clinical trial (CT) permission. The schedule did force the industry to conduct Phase III clinical trials for registration of a new drug and supported growth of a predominantly generic Indian pharmaceutical industry. However, this schedule only permitted clinical trials at a phase lower than its global status. This phase lag obstructed integration of India in global clinical development.

The next major step has been revision of Schedule Y in Jan 2005. 12 As compared to Schedule Y 1988, which had narrow and restrictive definitions of clinical trial phases, the amended Schedule Y 2005 provided pragmatic definitions for Phase I to IV. 12 The definitions and guidelines for clinical trial phases are broad and rational. The earlier restrictions on number patients and centers in early phases stipulated in Schedule Y 1988 were removed allowing the sponsor company freedom to decide these in relation to protocol requirements. The phase lag requirements gave way to acceptance of concurrent Phase II-III as part of global clinical trials.

Schedule Y 2005 legalized Indian GCP guidelines of 2001. This schedule stipulated GCP responsibilities of ethics committee (EC), investigator and sponsor and suggested formats for critical documents e.g. consent, report, EC approval, reporting of serious adverse event. These amendments in Schedule Y have been a major step forward in direction of GCP compliant trials and have provided the much-needed regulatory support to GCP guidelines.

Since the Scurvy trial, clinical trials have evolved into a standardized procedure, focusing on scientific assessment of efficacy and guarding the patient safety. As the discipline of drug development is enriched by novel therapies and technologies, there will always be a continuing need to balance medical progress and patient safety. As the scientific advances continue to occur, there will be new ethical and regulatory challenges requiring dynamic updates in ethical and legal framework of clinical trials.

• 2020 IN REVIEW

10 awesome science discoveries you may have missed in 2020

From the discovery of stardust older than the sun to the first tyrannosaur embryos, here are some fascinating findings that may have been overshadowed this year.

Researchers in Chiquihuite Cave wear protective gear to prevent contamination of excavation areas where they are looking for genetic signatures of plants and animals.

This year has produced an unprecedented news frenzy. As the deadly coronavirus pandemic raged around the world, lives were uprooted . Readers eagerly anticipated every bit of progress toward a vaccine . The killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism . Wildfires rampaged across western North America, including five of the six largest fires in California since 1932, and hurricanes tore through coastal cities, with so many forming that scientists ran out of names for the storms. In the final few months of 2020, a historically divisive election dominated headlines.

Yet among these pivotal events were an array of scientific discoveries that slipped under the radar. As 2020 comes to a close, we look back at ten significant developments that you might have missed.

Bursts of dust from aging stars, similar to the Egg Nebula pictured above, are one possible source of the large ancient grains found in meteorites.

This scanning electron microscope image shows one of the grains dated in this study. At its longest, the grain is roughly eight micrometers across—smaller than the width of a human hair.

1. Oldest material found on Earth is more ancient than our solar system

Billions of years before our sun winked into existence, a dying star flung dust out into space. Now a bit of that stardust, trapped in a meteorite that collided with Earth, was dated as the oldest material yet found on our planet. The dust coalesced with other rocks inside what would become the Murchison meteorite , which lit up skies over Australia in September 1969 as it careened to the surface of our planet.

A fresh analysis of these ancient rocks found grains of stardust that are between 4.6 billion years and roughly 7 billion years old. Scientists estimate that these early dust pieces lurk only in about five percent of meteorites, but that hasn’t discouraged them from continuing to hunt for these clues to our galaxy’s history.

An illustration shows what Tyrannosaurus rex hatchlings may have looked like. The newly described embryonic fossils were not from T. rex, but an earlier species of related tyrannosaur that has not been identified.

2. First tyrannosaur embryos discovered

Researchers have identified the remains of tyrannosaurs so young they hadn’t yet broken free from their shells . The discovery comes from finds at two different sites—a foot claw unearthed in 2018 from the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in Alberta, Canada, and a lower jaw recovered in 1983 from the Two Medicine Formation of Montana. Analysis of the remains, which are 71 to 75 million years old, revealed that tyrannosaurs started out surprisingly small, measuring an estimated three feet long— about the size of a Chihuahua, but with an extra-long tail . This length is only about a tenth of their full-grown counterparts and might help explain why researchers haven’t yet found other examples of these tiny tyrants—most scientists just weren’t looking for such a pint-sized predator.

An artist’s impression of the InSight lander on Mars. Short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight is designed to listen for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track Mars’s wobble as it orbits the sun.

3. Mars is humming, and scientists aren’t sure why

In November 2018, a spacecraft arrived on Mars’s frigid, dusty surface to take the planet’s pulse. Known as the InSight lander, the robotic geologist recently beamed some of its early findings back to Earth, exciting and perplexing scientists around the world. Among these curiosities is a Martian hum— a quiet, constant drone that seems to pulse to the beat of “marsquakes” that rattle the planet .

The hum’s origin remains unknown. Earth has many such background vibrations, from the roar of winds to the crashing of waves against the shore. But the music of Mars reverberates at a higher pitch than most natural hums on Earth. Perhaps the geology underneath the lander amplifies one particular tone, or the lander itself might even be generating the noise. “It’s extremely puzzling,” Bruce Banerdt , the principal investigator of the InSight mission, told National Geographic in February.

4. Mystery of the star Betelgeuse’s strange behavior finally solved

Betelgeuse is usually among the brightest stars in the sky, but in December 2019, its intense twinkle mysteriously dimmed. The dramatic change set scientists abuzz: Perhaps Betelgeuse was at the end of its life and could explode in a supernova brighter than the full moon. Yet in August of this year, NASA announced a far less extraordinary explanation for its suddenly shadowed face: The star burped.

Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the star likely sent out a superhot jet of plasma that cooled as it whipped outward. The process formed a cloud of stardust that could have blocked Betelgeuse’s light from eager earthbound viewers. The star returned to its normal brightness this past spring—so sky-watchers will have to wait for its fiery death.

Some 110 million years ago in what's now northwestern Alberta, the nodosaur Borealopelta markmitchelli ate ferns in a recently burnt landscape—a detailed vignette provided by a new study of its stomach contents.

5. Stunning details of an armored dinosaur’s last meal

The brilliantly preserved front half of a 110-million-year-old armored dinosaur—bony plates, scales, and all—surprised and delighted scientists after it was accidentally unearthed in 2011 by a heavy equipment operator working in an Alberta oil sands mine. But this year, the spiky creature served up even more excitement when an analysis revealed that the animal’s last meal was also preserved in its belly .

The dinosaur was a nodosaur, which is a type of ankylosaur but lacks the clubbed tail of some of its cousins. The ball of fossilized vegetation from the nodosaur’s stomach revealed that a few hours before its death, it largely munched on a specific type of fern selected from a variety of available plantlife. Rings of woody twigs eaten along with the ferns revealed that the nodosaur likely died during the summer. While only a single meal, the find provides an exceptional look at the final hours of a creature's life more than a hundred million years ago.

A health worker carries Kakule Kavendivwa, 14, to a waiting ambulance in Beni last year. The day before, Kakule's sisters had taken him to a nearby health center, but fled when the team encouraged them to go to a treatment center. The health center alerted the World Health Organization, which found the family. After several hours of talking with community outreach workers, they allowed an ambulance to take him for treatment.

6. The second-largest Ebola outbreak is finally over

On June 25, the World Health Organization declared the end of the second largest Ebola outbreak , which infected more than 3,480 and killed nearly 2,300 . Known as the Kivu outbreak, the event began in August 2018 with a cluster of cases near Kivu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever marked by a host of symptoms —including bleeding, fever, stomach pains, weakness, and rashes—and is spread through direct contact with an infected person or animal’s blood or bodily fluids. Containing the disease in Kivu was particularly difficult due to local unrest, which led to suspicions about any government or international organization efforts to curb the disease’s spread. However, armed with a new vaccine, healthcare workers, led by Michael Yao of the WHO, launched a campaign to vaccinate anyone who may have been exposed. By also improving community engagement, this effort led to the vaccination of more than 300,000 people.

“We should celebrate this moment, but we must resist complacency,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press release about the end of the outbreak. “Viruses do not take breaks.” Another outbreak (now contained) occurred in early June near the DRC’s Équateur Province.

Skull fragments from an early Homo erectus individual were discovered in South Africa—the first time the species was found in the region.

7. Found: Oldest Homo erectus skull

Extracted from rocks northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, the skull pieces initially seemed like they came from an ancient baboon. But as Jesse Martin and Angeline Leece, both students of La Trobe University in Australia, assembled the pieces, they realized they held the first braincase of Homo erectus yet found in Southern Africa . What’s more, dated to some two million years old, the skull marks the earliest remains of this ancient human ancestor. “I don’t think our supervisors believed us until they came over to have a look,” Martin told National Geographic last spring. The discovery helps researchers continue to decipher our tangled family tree, figuring out when and where our host of ancient relatives arose.

Reconstruction of the nesting ground of Hypacrosaurus stebingeri from the Two Medicine formation of Montana. In the center a deceased Hypacrosaurus nestling has the back of its skull embedded in shallow waters. A mourning adult is portrayed on the right.

8. Hints of the first dinosaur DNA

In Jurassic Park, isolating dinosaur DNA is as simple as extracting the blood feast of an ancient mosquito encased in amber. While we’re still far from bringing this piece of science fiction to life, researchers did make a mighty leap forward in the study of fossilized DNA. While studying well-preserved fossils more than 70 million years old, a team identified the outlines of cells, forms that may be chromosomes, and several possible nuclei—the structures that house DNA . They haven’t extracted DNA from the fossil cells, however, so they can’t confirm yet whether the material is unaltered DNA or another genetic byproduct. But it’s an exciting look at the finer details that fossilization can preserve. “The possibilities are absolutely thrilling,” David Evans , a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum who wasn’t involved with the study, told National Geographic in March.

Scientists compare notes on the stratigraphy of Chiquihuite Cave in preparation for sampling traces of plant and animal DNA from the sediments.

9. Surprise cave discoveries may push back people’s arrival in the Americas

Stone objects recovered from deep inside the Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico hint that humans may have arrived in the Americas as early as 30,000 years ago —roughly twice the age of most current arrival estimates. This date is hotly debated among archaeologists, with many initially placing the first human presence in the Americas at around 13,500 years ago, as ice sheets receded and migration routes from Asia opened up. But recent evidence has pushed the date of human arrival back by thousands of years. And the new analysis of stone artifacts, including blades, projectile points, and rock flakes, interspersed with bits of charcoal dated to some 30,000 years old, suggests humans likely arrived in the Americas before glaciers began to melt.

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Studying the cave suggests it could have been hospitable tens of thousands of years ago, as the region was likely much cooler, wetter, and greener than it is today. Yet no human remains have yet been found, and the new study is stirring controversy among scientists. "Chiquihuite's main contribution is that it brings you another tiny light, another tiny signal, that there is something there," the paper’s lead author Ciprian Ardelean , an archaeologist with the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, told National Geographic in July.

Newly discovered tower of coral, standing more than 1,640 feet tall, adds to the seven other so-called detached reefs in the northern Great Barrier Reef.

10. A reef taller than the Empire State Building

A team of Australian scientists on board the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor was mapping the northern Great Barrier Reef seafloor when they stumbled on a towering skyscraper of coral more than 1,640 feet tall—the first of its kind discovered in more than 120 years. Known as a detached reef, the newfound coral tower is one of eight now known in the region. These natural structures provide vital habitats for creatures like turtles and sharks, which flit in and out of the deep waters adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. The team mapped the detached reef, finding a variety of lifeforms thriving in the ecosystem. They collected samples of rock, sediments, and some organisms that will be sent to labs for analysis.

While more details about this reef will likely emerge, taxonomists studying the imagery and video have already identified several new fish species. Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, said in a press release that t he discovery is part of a revolution in marine science: "Thanks to new technologies that work as our eyes, ears, and hands in the deep ocean, we have the capacity to explore like never before.”

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Science News

Here are our favorite cool, funny and bizarre science stories of 2021.

From potty training cows, to xenobots, to a star that ate another star, then exploded

A swarm of xenobots (bright spots) swims around and pushes small particles.

Douglas Blackiston

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By Trishla Ostwal

December 23, 2021 at 6:00 am

A range of cool discoveries, technological milestones and downright bizarre scientific feats — cows can be potty trained? — gave us a chance to gab about something other than the pandemic.

Fusion of the future

Hopes for making nuclear fusion the clean energy source of the future got a boost in August when a fusion experiment released 1.3 million joules of energy ( SN: 9/11/21, p. 11 ). A big hurdle for fusion energy has been achieving ignition — the point when a fusion reaction produces more energy than required to trigger it. The test released about 70 percent of the energy used to set off the reaction, the closest yet to the break-even milestone.

Pig-to-human kidney transplant

In a first, a pig kidney was attached to a human , and the organ functioned normally during 54 hours of monitoring ( SN: 11/20/21, p. 6 ). This successful surgical experiment marks a milestone toward true animal-to-human transplants, which would broaden the supply of lifesaving organs for people in need.

Death stars

In a bone-chilling event, astronomers caught a star swallowing a nearby black hole , or perhaps a neutron star, and then getting eaten by its own meal. The resulting spectacular explosion left behind a black hole ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 6 ). Astronomers had theorized that such a star-eat-star supernova was possible, but had never observed one.

Living machines

Frog cells transformed themselves into tiny living robots ( SN: 4/24/21, p. 8 ). Scientists removed skin stem cells from frog embryos and watched the cells organize into little blobs dubbed “xenobots” that could swim around and even repair themselves, plus move particles in the environment. Xenobots might someday serve a useful purpose, such as cleaning up waterways, the scientists say.

Brain teaser

Scientists got an entirely new view of the brain when they took a tiny piece of a woman’s brain and mapped the varied shapes of 50,000 cells and their 100 million or so connections ( SN: 7/3/21 & 7/17/21, p. 6 ). The vast dataset may help unravel the complexities of the brain.

Pluses are minuses

People often add even when subtracting is the way to go , scientists found after asking volunteers to tackle a variety of puzzles and problems, including stabilizing a Lego structure and optimizing a travel itinerary ( SN: 5/8/21 & 5/22/21, p. 8 ). The tendency to think in pluses instead of minuses could be at the root of modern-­day excesses like cluttered homes, the researchers speculate.

Potty training cows

Can farmers reduce pollution by sending cows to the loo? The answer might very well be yes. In a unique experiment, scientists trained cows to answer nature’s call by using a bathroom stall that gathers urine ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 24 ). In the future, collected cow urine, which could otherwise pollute the environment, might be used to make fertilizer.

Crystal clear

The intense heat and pressure of the first atomic bomb test, in 1945, left behind a glassy substance known as trinitite — and something even stranger. Within the trinitite, scientists discovered, is a rare form of matter called a quasicrystal ( SN: 6/19/21, p. 12 ). Quasicrystals have an orderly structure like a normal crystal, but that structure doesn’t repeat. Previously, these crystals had been found only in meteorites or made in the lab.

Case of the missing genes

A foul-smelling Southeast Asian plant named Sapria himalayana has lost about 44 percent of the genes found in most other flowering plants ( SN: 3/13/21, p. 13 ). S. himalayana parasitizes other plants to get nutrients, so it’s not so surprising that it has entirely purged its chloroplast DNA. Chloroplasts are the structures where photosynthesis, or food making, typically occurs. S. himalayana appears to steal more than nutrients — more than 1 percent of its genes come from other plants, perhaps current or past hosts.

DNA accounting

Identical twins may not be genetically identical, after all. They differ by 5.2 genetic changes on average , researchers reported ( SN: 1/30/21, p. 15 ). That means differences between such twins may not be solely due to environmental influences. In other DNA accounting, scientists estimated that 1.5 percent to 7 percent of modern human DNA is uniquely human, distinct from the DNA of Neandertals, Denisovans and other ancient relatives ( SN: 8/14/21, p. 7 ).

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Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.

Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances.

As is often the case with psychological studies, the whole setup was a put-on. Though half the notes were indeed genuine—they’d been obtained from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office—the scores were fictitious. The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought they had, in fact, done quite well—significantly better than the average student—even though, as they’d just been told, they had zero grounds for believing this. Conversely, those who’d been assigned to the low-score group said that they thought they had done significantly worse than the average student—a conclusion that was equally unfounded.

“Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”

A few years later, a new set of Stanford students was recruited for a related study. The students were handed packets of information about a pair of firefighters, Frank K. and George H. Frank’s bio noted that, among other things, he had a baby daughter and he liked to scuba dive. George had a small son and played golf. The packets also included the men’s responses on what the researchers called the Risky-Conservative Choice Test. According to one version of the packet, Frank was a successful firefighter who, on the test, almost always went with the safest option. In the other version, Frank also chose the safest option, but he was a lousy firefighter who’d been put “on report” by his supervisors several times. Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs. What sort of attitude toward risk did they think a successful firefighter would have? The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,” since two data points would never have been enough information to generalize from.

The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today —knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them. Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments. One of the most famous of these was conducted, again, at Stanford. For this experiment, researchers rounded up a group of students who had opposing opinions about capital punishment. Half the students were in favor of it and thought that it deterred crime; the other half were against it and thought that it had no effect on crime.

The students were asked to respond to two studies. One provided data in support of the deterrence argument, and the other provided data that called it into question. Both studies—you guessed it—were made up, and had been designed to present what were, objectively speaking, equally compelling statistics. The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro-capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.

If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias. Imagine, Mercier and Sperber suggest, a mouse that thinks the way we do. Such a mouse, “bent on confirming its belief that there are no cats around,” would soon be dinner. To the extent that confirmation bias leads people to dismiss evidence of new or underappreciated threats—the human equivalent of the cat around the corner—it’s a trait that should have been selected against. The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”

Mercier and Sperber prefer the term “myside bias.” Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.

A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems. They were then asked to explain their responses, and were given a chance to modify them if they identified mistakes. The majority were satisfied with their original choices; fewer than fifteen per cent changed their minds in step two.

In step three, participants were shown one of the same problems, along with their answer and the answer of another participant, who’d come to a different conclusion. Once again, they were given the chance to change their responses. But a trick had been played: the answers presented to them as someone else’s were actually their own, and vice versa. About half the participants realized what was going on. Among the other half, suddenly people became a lot more critical. Nearly sixty per cent now rejected the responses that they’d earlier been satisfied with.

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This lopsidedness, according to Mercier and Sperber, reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group. Living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, our ancestors were primarily concerned with their social standing, and with making sure that they weren’t the ones risking their lives on the hunt while others loafed around in the cave. There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.

Among the many, many issues our forebears didn’t worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It’s no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, “This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.”

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, “The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone” (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water—and everything that’s been deposited in it—gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth,” just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins.

“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn’t have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine’s location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

“This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,” Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, “may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people’s natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦

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Research misconduct claims are growing. Will new rules help universities investigate?

Scientific sleuths say the updated rules aren’t enough to make a dent in research integrity violations.

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By Anil Oza

Sept. 20, 2024

Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellow

Amid a steady rise in research misconduct allegations over the past decade, the Department of Human Health and Services last week updated its guidance on how universities and other institutions investigate claims. It’s a move that experts say is a step in the right direction — though many warn that more systemic change is needed to address mounting concerns over data manipulation and other issues in the sciences.

The new guidance will affect nearly 6,000 universities and other institutions with projects funded by HHS, which have until 2026 to comply. The goal is to help institutions “handle these allegations efficiently and fairly and assure those people that are making allegations know the process we’re going to follow,” Sheila Garrity, director of the HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI), told STAT.

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Among the noteworthy updates to the final rules are clarifying both the process to appeal a decision made by the ORI and how institutions can deem certain instances the result of an “honest mistake.” 

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Research Facts on Homeschooling

Research facts on homeschooling, homeschooling: the research.

Research Facts on Homeschooling, Homeschool Fast Facts

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D. May 29, 2024    Copyright © 2024 National Home Education Research Institute

This article gives key research facts on homeschooling

General facts, statistics, and trends.

• There were about 3.1 million homeschool students in 2021-2022 in grades K-12 in the United States  (roughly 6% of school-age children). There were about 2.5 million homeschool students in spring 2019 (or 3% to 4% of school-age children) [note 1]. The homeschool population had been growing at an estimated 2% to 8% per annum over the past several years, but it grew drastically from 2019-2020 to 2020-2021.

• Homeschooling – that is, parent-led home-based education; home education – is an age-old traditional educational practice that a decade ago appeared to be cutting-edge and “alternative” but is now bordering on “mainstream” in the United States. It may be the fastest-growing form of education in the United States. Home-based education has also been growing around the world in many other nations (e.g., Australia, Canada, France, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Russia, Mexico, South Korea, Thailand, and the United Kingdom).
• A demographically wide variety of people homeschool – these are atheists, Christians, and Mormons; conservatives, libertarians, and liberals; low-, middle-, and high-income families; black, Hispanic, and white; parents with Ph.D.s, GEDs, and no high-school diplomas. One nationwide study shows that 41% of homeschool students are Black, Asian, Hispanic, and others (i.e., not White/non-Hispanic) (U.S. Department of Education, 2019).
• Taxpayers spend an average of $16,446 per pupil annually in public schools, plus capital expenditures (National Education Association, 2023). The roughly 3.1 million homeschool students of 2021-22 represented a savings of over $51 billion for taxpayers. This is $51 billion that American taxpayers did not have to spend.
• Taxpayers spend nothing on the vast majority of homeschool students, while homeschool families spend an average of $600 per student annually for their education. Families engaged in home-based education are not dependent on public, tax-funded resources for their children’s education.
• Homeschooling is quickly growing in popularity among minorities. About 41% of homeschool families are non-white/non-Hispanic (i.e., not white/Anglo).
• It is estimated that over 9 million Americans had experienced being homeschooled as of February of 2020.

Reasons and Motivations for Home Educating

Most parents and youth decide to homeschool for more than one reason. The most common reasons given for homeschooling are the following:

• customize or individualize the curriculum and learning environment for each child,
• accomplish more academically than in schools,
• use pedagogical approaches other than those typical in institutional schools,
• enhance family relationships between children and parents and among siblings,
• provide guided and reasoned social interactions with youthful peers and adults,
• provide a safer environment for children and youth, because of physical violence, drugs and alcohol, psychological abuse, racism, and improper and unhealthy sexuality associated with institutional schools, and
• as an alternative education approach when public or private institutional schools are closed due to acute health situations such as related to disease (e.g., Covid-19, Coronavirus)
• protect minority children from racism in public schools or lower expectations of children of color (e.g., black) (e.g., Fields-Smith, 2020; Mazama & Lundy, 2012).
• teach and impart a particular set of values, beliefs, and worldview to children and youth.

Academic Performance

• The home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests (Ray, 2010, 2015, 2017; Ray & Hoelzle, 2024). (The public school average is roughly the 50 th percentile; scores range from 1 to 99.) A 2015 study found Black homeschool students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public school students (Ray, 2015).
• 78% of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools ( Ray, 2017 ).
• Homeschool students score above average on achievement tests regardless of their parents’ level of formal education or their family’s household income.
• Whether homeschool parents were ever certified teachers is not notably related to their children’s academic achievement.
• Degree of state control and regulation of homeschooling is not related to academic achievement.
• Home-educated students typically score above average on the SAT and ACT tests that colleges consider for admissions.
• Homeschool students are increasingly being actively recruited by colleges.

Social, Emotional, and Psychological Development (Socialization)

• Research facts on homeschooling show that the home-educated are doing well, typically above average, on measures of social, emotional, and psychological development. Research measures include peer interaction, self-concept, leadership skills, family cohesion, participation in community service, and self-esteem.
• 87% of peer-reviewed studies on social, emotional, and psychological development show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in conventional schools ( Ray, 2017 ).
• Homeschool students are regularly engaged in social and educational activities outside their homes and with people other than their nuclear-family members. They are commonly involved in activities such as field trips, scouting, 4-H, political drives, church ministry, sports teams, and community volunteer work.
• The balance of research to date suggests that homeschool students may suffer less harm (e.g., abuse, neglect, fatalities) than conventional school students.
• Adults who were home educated are more politically tolerant than the public schooled in the limited research done so far.

Gender Differences in Children and Youth Respected?

• One researcher finds that homeschooling gives young people an unusual chance to ask questions such as, “Who am I?” and “What do I really want?,” and through the process of such asking and gradually answering the questions home-educated girls develop the strengths and the resistance abilities that give them an unusually strong sense of self.
• Some think that boys’ energetic natures and tendency to physical expression can more easily be accommodated in home-based education. Many are concerned that a highly disproportionate number of public school special-education students are boys and that boys are 2.5 times as likely as girls in public schools to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Success in the “Real World” of Adulthood

The research base on adults who were home educated is growing; thus far it indicates that:

• 69% of peer-reviewed studies on success into adulthood (including college) show adults who were home educated succeed and perform statistically significantly better than those who attended institutional schools ( Ray, 2017 ),
• they participate in local community service more frequently than does the general population (e.g., Seiver & Pope, 2022 ),
• these adults vote and attend public meetings more frequently than the general population,
• they go to college at a similar rate and succeed at college at an equal or higher rate than the general population, and
• by adulthood, they internalize the values and beliefs of their parents at a high rate.

General Interpretation of Research on Homeschool Success or Failure

It is possible that homeschooling causes the positive traits reported above. However, the research designs to date do not conclusively “prove” or substantiate that homeschooling causes these things. One hypothesis is that the positive findings might be due to the demographics of the homeschool students and families in the studies. The “sources” (articles) below explain limitations and caveats regarding the studies. More methodologically stronger research needs to be done to find whether homeschooling is what leads to or causes better outcomes.  At the same time, there is no empirical evidence that homeschooling overall causes negative things compared to institutional schooling. Future research may better answer the question of causation.

1. For more detail, see How Many Homeschool Students Are There in the United States? The March of 2021 estimate is based on data from state governments (e.g., Delaware, Florida, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Virginia), the U.S. Census Bureau (2021), and the U.S. Department of Education (2019). See McDonald (2020). The spring 2019 estimate was based on an estimate of about 2.5% per annum growth from estimates of 2 million home-educated children during the spring of 2010 and 2.3 million spring of 2016 in the United States (Ray, 2011). The estimate of 2.3 million in 2016 was calculated by Brian D. Ray, the author of this fact sheet, on April 7, 2016. He based it on publicly available research findings.

The above findings are extensively documented in one or more of the following sources, and most are available from www.nheri.org:

• Cheng, Albert. (2014). Does homeschooling or private schooling promote political intolerance? Evidence from a Christian university. Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform , 8(1), 49-68 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Fields-Smith, Cheryl. (2020). Exploring single black mothers’ resistance through homeschooling . Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham.
• Mazama, Ama; & Lundy, Garvey. (2012, August 26). African American homeschooling as racial protectionism. Journal of Black Studies, 43 (7) 723–748.
• McDonald, Kerry. (2020). Homeschooling more than doubles during the pandemic: State-level data show just how dramatic the surge in homeschooling has been. Retrieved December 29, 2020 from https://fee.org/articles/homeschooling-more-than-doubles-during-the-pandemic/
• Mead, Sara. (2006). The truth about boys and girls.
• Medlin, Richard G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88 (3), 284-297 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Murphy, Joseph. (2012). Homeschooling in America: Capturing and assessing the movement . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, a Sage Company.
• National Education Association. (2023). Rankings of the States 2022 and Estimates of School Statistics 2023,  https://www.nea.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/2023-rankings-and-estimates-report.pdf
• Ray, Brian D. (2004). Home educated and now adults: Their community and civic involvement, views about homeschooling, and other traits. Salem, Oregon: NHERI.
• Ray, Brian D. (2004). Homeschoolers on to college: What research shows us. Ray, Journal of College Admission , No. 185, 5-11 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Ray, Brian D. (2010). Academic achievement and demographic traits of homeschool students: A nationwide study. Academic Leadership Journal, 8, www.academicleadership.org [a peer-reviewed journal]. For a free copy, contact us .
• Ray, Brian D. (2013). Homeschooling associated with beneficial learner and societal outcomes but educators do not promote it. Peabody Journal of Education, 88 (3), 324-341 [a peer-reviewed journal].
• Ray, Brian D. (2015). African American homeschool parents’ motivations for homeschooling and their Black children’s academic achievement. Journal of School Choice, 9 :71–96 [a peer-reviewed journal]. For a free copy, contact us .
• Ray, Brian D. (2017). A systematic review of the empirical research on selected aspects of homeschooling as a school choice. Journal of School Choice , 11 (4), 604-621 [a peer-reviewed journal]
• Ray, Brian D.; & Hoelzle, Braden R. (2024). Reasons for homeschooling and the correlates of home-educated students’ academic achievement: A new U.S. nationwide study. Presented at International School Choice and Reform Conference, Madrid, Spain, January 6, 2024.
• Ray, Brian D.; & Shakeel, M. Danish. (2022). Demographics are predictive of child abuse and neglect but homeschool versus conventional school is a nonissue: Evidence from a nationally representative survey. Journal of School Choice, https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2022.2108879  [a peer-reviewed journal]
• Seiver, Jillene Grove; & Pope, Elisa A. (2022). The kids are alright II: social engagement in young adulthood as a function of k-12 schooling type, personality traits, and parental education level. Home School Researcher , 37 (2), 1-9.
• Sheffer, Susannah. (1995). A sense of self: Listening to homeschooled adolescent girls .
• United States Department of Education. (2019) Homeschooling in the United States: Results from the 2012 and 2016 Parent and Family Involvement Survey (PFINHES: 2012 and 2016). Retrieved November 3, 2020 from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020001.pdf

About the Author

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D. is an internationally known researcher  (see Google Scholar Profile for many of his publications), educator, speaker, and expert witness, and serves as president of the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute. He is a former certified teacher in public and private schools and served as a professor in the fields of science, research methods, and education at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He holds a Ph.D. in science education from Oregon State University, a M.S. in zoology from Ohio University, and a B.S. in biology from the University of Puget Sound. Dr. Ray has been studying the homeschool movement since about 1984.

For more homeschool research and more in-depth interpretation of research, media, journalists, and others please contact:

National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI)

PO Box 13939 Salem OR 97309 USA

tel. (503) 364‑1490 [email protected] www.nheri.org

Copyright © 2024 by National Home Education Research Institute

About nheri.

NHERI conducts homeschooling research, is a clearinghouse of research for the public, researchers, homeschoolers, the media, and policy makers, and educates the public concerning the findings of all related research. NHERI executes, evaluates, and disseminates studies and information (e.g., statistics, facts, data) on homeschooling (i.e., home schooling, home-based education, home education, home school, home-schooling, unschooling, deschooling, a form of alternative education), publishes reports and the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Home School Researcher, and serves in consulting, academic achievement tests, and expert witness (in courts and legislatures).

PO Box 13939 Salem, OR 97309 503-364-1490 503-364-3837 fax contact NHERI

• Academic Leadership Journal
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New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People

Last year, a German court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted by the Nazis

Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation

In the fall of 2022, a German court heard an unusual case .

It was a civil lawsuit that grew out of a feud on Twitter about whether transgender people were victims of the Holocaust. Though there is no longer much debate about whether gay men and lesbians were persecuted by the Nazis, there’s been very little scholarship on trans people during this period.

The court took expert statements from historians before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime.

This is an important case. It was the first time a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany. It was followed a few months later by the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, formally releasing a statement recognizing trans and cisgender queer people as victims of fascism.

Up until the past few years, there had been little research on trans people under the Nazi regime. Historians like myself are now uncovering more cases , like that of Toni Simon.

Being transgender during the Weimar Republic

In 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler took power, the police in Essen, Germany, revoked Simon’s permit to dress as a woman in public. Simon, who was in her mid-40s, had been living as a woman for many years.

The Weimar Republic , the more tolerant democratic government that existed before Hitler, recognized the rights of trans people, though in a begrudging, limited way. Under the republic, police granted trans people permits like the one Simon had.

In the 1930s, transgender people were called “ transvestites ,” which is rarely a preferred term for trans people today, but at the time approximated what’s now meant by “transgender.” The police permits were called “transvestite certificates,” and they exempted a person from the laws against cross-dressing. Under the republic, trans people could also change their names legally, though they had to pick from a short, preapproved list.

In Berlin, transgender people published several magazines and had a political club. Some glamorous trans women worked at the internationally famous Eldorado cabaret . The sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld , who ran Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science , advocated for the rights of transgender people.

The rise of Nazi Germany destroyed this relatively open environment. The Nazis shut down the magazines, the Eldorado and Hirschfeld’s institute. Most people who held “transvestite certificates,” as Simon did, had them revoked or watched helplessly as police refused to honor them.

That was just the beginning of the trouble.

“Draconian measures” against trans people

In Nazi Germany, transgender people were not used as a political wedge issue in the way they are today. There was little public discussion of trans people.

What the Nazis did say about them, however, was chilling.

The author of a 1938 book on “the problem of transvestitism” wrote that before Hitler was in power, there was not much that could be done about transgender people, but that now, in Nazi Germany, they could be put in concentration camps or subjected to forced castration. That was good, he believed, because the “asocial mindset” of trans people and their supposedly frequent “criminal activity … justifies draconian measures by the state.”

Simon was a brave person. I first came across her police file when I was researching trans people at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . The Essen police knew Simon as the sassy proprietor of an underground club where LGBTQ people gathered. In the mid-1930s, she was hauled into court for criticizing the Nazi regime. By then, the Gestapo had had enough of her. Simon was a danger to youth, a Gestapo officer wrote. Sending her to a concentration camp was “absolutely necessary.”

I am not certain what happened to Simon. Her file ends abruptly, with the Gestapo planning her arrest. But there are no actual arrest papers. Hopefully, she evaded the police.

Other trans women did not escape. At the Hamburg State Archive , I read about H. Bode, who often went out in public dressed as a woman and dated men. Under the Weimar Republic, she held a transvestite certificate. Nazi police went after her for “cross-dressing” and for having sex with men. They considered her male, so her relationships were homosexual and illegal. They sent her to the concentration camp Buchenwald, where she was murdered.

Liddy Bacroff of Hamburg also had a transvestite pass under the republic. She made her living selling sex to male clients. After 1933, the police went after her. They wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” She too was sent to a camp, Mauthausen, and murdered.

Trans Germans previously misgendered

For a long time, the public didn’t know the stories of trans people in Nazi Germany.

Earlier histories tended to misgender trans women, labeling them as men. This is odd given that when you read the records of their police interrogations, they are often remarkably clear about their gender identity, even though they were not helping their cases at all by doing so.

Bacroff, for example, told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.”

There was also confusion caused by a few cases that, by chance, came to light first. In these cases, police acted less violently. For example, there is a well-known case from Berlin where police renewed a trans man’s “transvestite certificate” after he spent some months in a concentration camp. Historians initially took this case to be representative. Now that we have a lot more cases, we can see that it is an outlier. Police normally revoked the certificates.

A through line to today

Today, right-wing attacks against trans people in the United States are intensifying.

Though the American Academy of Pediatrics and every major medical association approve of gender-affirming health care for trans kids, Republican politicians have banned it in 22 states, with even more moving to prohibit it.

Gender-affirming medicine is now over 100 years old—and it has roots in Weimar Germany . It had never before been legally restricted in the U.S. Yet Missouri has essentially banned it for adults, and other states are trying to restrict adult care. A host of other anti-trans bills are moving through state legislatures.

I find it fitting, then, that A Transparent Musical premiered this spring in Los Angeles. In the show, fabulously dressed trans Berliners sing and dance in defiance of Nazi thugs.

It’s a reminder that attacks on trans people are nothing new—and that many of them are straight out of the Nazi playbook.

Editor’s Note, September 25, 2023: An earlier version of this story noted that the author’s testimony was submitted to a German court. While the testimony was submitted to a lawyer arguing in the court case, that lawyer did not ultimately submit it to the court. In addition, the story was edited in the third paragraph to more accurately reflect the decision of the German court.

This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of queer and transgender people in Weimar and Nazi Germany.

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101 random fun facts that will blow your mind

Our collection of the best interesting trivia covers animals, biology, geography, space and much more.

Photo credit: Getty

Toby Saunders

Tom Howarth

If you’re looking to impress your friends, kids and family with random fun facts, and weird and wonderful trivia, you've come to the right place. Below you can find 101 interesting facts that will reshape how you see our world – and far far beyond.

So, buckle up and prepare to amuse children, impress (or annoy) your co-workers, dazzle your dinner party guests, and have your own mind blown with our best collection of extraordinary and fun tidbits.

With random facts about everything from animals, space, geography, science, health, biology and much more, welcome to our odyssey of oddities.

101 of the best random fun facts

• A cloud weighs around a million tonnes . A cloud typically has a volume of around 1km 3 and a density of around 1.003kg per m 3 – that's a density that’s around 0.4 per cent lower than the air surrounding it ( this is how they are able to float ).
• Giraffes are 30 times more likely to get hit by lightning than people . True, there are only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. But due to the population of the species being just 140,000 during this time, it makes for about 0.003 lightning deaths per thousand giraffes each year. This is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans.
• Identical twins don’t have the same fingerprints . You can’t blame your crimes on your twin, after all. This is because environmental factors during development in the womb (umbilical cord length, position in the womb, and the rate of finger growth) impact your fingerprint.
• Earth’s rotation is changing speed . It's actually slowing . This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
• Your brain is constantly eating itself . This process is called phagocytosis , where cells envelop and consume smaller cells or molecules to remove them from the system. Don’t worry! Phagocytosis isn't harmful, but actually helps preserve your grey matter.
• The largest piece of fossilised dinosaur poo discovered is over 30cm long and over two litres in volume . Believed to be a Tyrannosaurus rex turd , the fossilised dung (also named a 'coprolite') is helping scientists better understand what the dinosaur ate.
• The Universe's average colou r is called 'Cosmic latte' . In a 2002 study, astronomers found that the light coming from galaxies averaged into a beige colour that’s close to white.
• Animals can experience time differently from humans . To smaller animals, the world around them moves more slowly compared to humans. Salamanders and lizards, for example, experience time more slowly than cats and dogs. This is because the perception of time depends on how quickly the brain can process incoming information.
• Water might not be wet . This is because most scientists define wetness as a liquid’s ability to maintain contact with a solid surface, meaning that water itself is not wet , but can make other objects wet.
• A chicken once lived for 18 months without a head . Mike the chicken's incredible feat was recorded back in the 1940s in the USA . He survived as his jugular vein and most of his brainstem were left mostly intact, ensuring just enough brain function remained for survival. In the majority of cases, a headless chicken dies in a matter of minutes.
• All the world’s bacteria stacked on top of each other would stretch for 10 billion light-years . Together, Earth's 0.001mm-long microbes could wrap around the Milky Way over 20,000 times.
• Wearing a tie can reduce blood flow to the brain by 7.5 per cent . A study in 2018 found that wearing a necktie can reduce the blood flow to your brain by up to 7.5 per cent, which can make you feel dizzy, nauseous, and cause headaches. They can also increase the pressure in your eyes if on too tight and are great at carrying germs.
• The fear of long words is called Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia . The 36-letter word was first used by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BCE to criticise those writers with an unreasonable penchant for long words. It was American poet Aimee Nezheukumatathil, possibly afraid of their own surname, who coined the term how we know it in 2000.
• The world’s oldest dog lived to 29.5 years old . While the median age a dog reaches tends to be about 10-15 years , one Australian cattle dog, ‘Bluey’, survived to the ripe old age of 29.5.
• The world’s oldest cat lived to 38 years and three days old . Creme Puff was the oldest cat to ever live .
• The Sun makes a sound but we can't hear it . In the form of pressure waves, the Sun does make a sound . The wavelength of the pressure waves from the Sun is measured in hundreds of miles, however, meaning they are far beyond the range of human hearing.
• Mount Everest isn't the tallest mountain on Earth . Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the twin volcanoes, are taller than Mount Everest due to 4.2km of their heights being submerged underwater. The twin volcanoes measure a staggering 10.2km in total, compared to Everest’s paltry 4.6km.
• Our solar system has a wall . The heliopause – the region of space in which solar wind isn’t hot enough to push back the wind of particles coming from distant stars – is often considered the “boundary wall” of the Solar System and interstellar space.
• Octopuses don’t actually have tentacles . They have eight limbs, but they're arms (for most species). Technically, when talking about cephalopods (octopuses, squids etc), scientists define tentacles as limbs with suckers at their end. Octopus arms have suckers down most of their length.
• Most maps of the world are wrong . On most maps, the Mercator projection – first developed in 1569 – is still used. This method is wildly inaccurate and makes Alaska appear as large as Brazil and Greenland 14 times larger than it actually is. For a map to be completely accurate, it would need to be life-size and round, not flat.
• NASA genuinely faked part of the Moon landing . While Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface were categorically not faked, the astronaut quarantine protocol when the astronauts arrived back on Earth was largely just one big show .
• Comets smell like rotten eggs . A comet smells like rotten eggs, urine, burning matches, and… almonds. Traces of hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide were all found in the makeup of the comet 67P/Churyumove-Gerasimenko. Promotional postcards were even commissioned in 2016 carrying the pungent scent of a comet.
• Earth’s poles are moving . This magnetic reversal of the North and South Pole has happened 171 times in the past 71 million years. We’re overdue a flip. It could come soon , as the North Pole is moving at around 55 kilometres per year, an increase over the 15km per year up until 1990.
• You can actually die laughing . And a number of people have , typically due to intense laughter causing a heart attack or suffocation. Comedy shows should come with a warning.
• Chainsaws were first invented for childbirth . It was developed in Scotland in the late 18th Century to help aid and speed up the process of symphysiotomy (widening the pubic cartilage) and removal of disease-laden bone during childbirth. It wasn’t until the start of the 20th Century that we started using chainsaws for woodchopping.
• Ants don’t have lungs . They instead breathe through spiracles , nine or ten tiny openings, depending on the species.
• The T.rex likely had feathers . Scientists in China discovered Early Cretaceous period tyrannosaur skeletons that were covered in feathers . If the ancestors of the T. rex had feathers, the T. rex probably did, too.
• Football teams wearing red kits play better . The colour of your clothes can affect how you’re perceived by others and change how you feel. A review of football matches in the last 55 years, for example, showed that teams wearing a red kit consistently played better in home matches than teams in any other colour.
• Wind turbines kill between 10,000 and 100,000 birds each year in the UK . Interestingly, painting one of the blades of a wind turbine black can reduce bird deaths by 70 per cent .
• Snails have teeth . Between 1,000 and 12,000 teeth, to be precise. They aren’t like ours , though, so don’t be thinking about snails with ridiculous toothy grins. You’ll find the snail's tiny 'teeth' all over its file-like tongue.
• Sound can be minus decibels . The quietest place on Earth is Microsoft’s anechoic chamber in Redmond, WA, USA, at -20.6 decibels. These anechoic chambers are built out of heavy concrete and brick and are mounted on springs to stop vibrations from getting in through the floor.
• A horse normally has more than one horsepower . A study in 1993 showed that the maximum power a horse can produce is 18,000W, around 24 horsepower.
• Your signature could reveal personality traits . A study in 2016 purports that among men, a larger signature correlates with higher social bravado and, among women, a bigger signature correlates with narcissistic traits.
• One in 18 people have a third nipple . Known as polythelia , the third nipple is caused by a mutation in inactive genes.
• Bananas are radioactive . Due to being rich in potassium, every banana is actually slightly radioactive thanks to containing the natural isotope potassium-40. Interestingly, your body contains around 16mg of potassium-40, meaning you’re around 280 times more radioactive than a banana already. Any excess potassium-40 you gain from a banana is excreted out within a few hours.
• There’s no such thing as a straight line . Zoom in close enough to anything and you’ll spot irregularities. Even a laser light beam is slightly curved.
• Deaf people are known to use sign language in their sleep . A case study of a 71-year-old man with rapid eye movement disorder and a severe hearing impairment showed him using fluent sign language in his sleep , with researchers able to get an idea of what he was dreaming about thanks to those signs.
• Finland is the happiest country on Earth. According to the World Happiness Report, it has been for six years in a row . It’s not really surprising, given that Finland is the home of Santa Claus, reindeer and one sauna for every 1.59 people.
• Hippos can’t swim . Hippos really do have big bones, so big and dense, in fact, that they’re barely buoyant at all. They don’t swim and instead perform a slow-motion gallop on the riverbed or on the sea floor. In fact, hippos can even sleep underwater , thanks to a built-in reflex that allows them to bob up, take a breath, and sink back down without waking.
• The Moon looks upside down in the Southern Hemisphere . Compared to the Northern Hemisphere, anyway. This means that the ‘Man in the Moon’ is upside down in the Southern Hemisphere and looks more like a rabbit .
• You can yo-yo in space. In 2012, NASA astronaut Don Pettit took a yo-yo on board the International Space Station and demonstrated several tricks. It works because a yo-yo mainly relies on the laws of conservation of angular momentum to perform tricks, which, provided you keep the string taut, apply in microgravity too.
• Not only plants photosynthesise. Algae (which are not plants) and some other organisms – including sea slugs and pea aphids – contain chlorophyll and can also take sunlight and turn it into an energy source.
• You can be heavily pregnant and not realise . Cryptic pregnancies aren’t that uncommon , with 1 in 500 not recognised until at least halfway through and 1 in 2,500 not known until labour starts.
• Bacteria on your skin cause your itches. Specifically, bacteria known as Staphylococcus aureus can release a chemical that activates a protein in our nerves . This sends a signal from our skin to our brains, which our brain perceives as an itch.
• Starfish don’t have bodies. Along with other echinoderms (think sea urchins and sand dollars), their entire bodies are technically classed as heads . 
• Somebody has been constipated for 45 days . In 2013, an unfortunate Indian woman had to undergo surgical removal of a faecal mass as large as a football .
• You travel 2.5 million km a day around the Sun without realising . The Earth’s orbit travels around 2.5 million kilometres with respect to the Sun’s centre , and around 19 million km with respect to the centre of the Milky Way.
• Fish form orderly queues in emergencies. When evacuating through narrow spaces in sketchy situations, schools of neon tetra fish queue so that they don’t collide or clog up the line. Scientists interpreted this behaviour as showing that fish can respect social rules even in emergency situations, unlike us humans. 
• There are more bacterial cells in your body than human cells . The average human is around 56 per cent bacteria. This was discovered in a 2016 study and is far less than the earlier estimates of 90 per cent. As bacteria are so light, however, by weight, each person is over 99.7 per cent human.
• Most ginger cats are male . There are roughly three ginger male cats to one ginger female . This is because the ginger gene is found on the X chromosome, meaning female cats would require two copies of the gene to become ginger whilst males only need one.
• Your nails grow faster in hot summer . This is probably due to increased blood supply to the fingertips . It could also be because you’re less stressed while on holiday so less likely to gnaw away at ‘em.
• Insects can fly up to 3.25km above sea level, at least . Alpine bumblebees have been found living as high up as 3.25km above sea level and could even fly in lab conditions that replicate the air density and oxygen levels at 9km – that's just higher than Mount Everest.
• There’s a planet mostly made from diamond . Called 55 Cancri e , it's around twice the size of Earth and some 40 light-years away from us within the Cancer constellation.
• Animals can be allergic to humans . Animals can be allergic to our dead skin cells – dander. These allergic reactions can be just like ours, too, including breathing difficulties and skin irritation.
• Being bored is actually a 'high arousal state' physiologically . This is because when you're bored your heart rate increases .
• Platypuses sweat milk . This is because it doesn't have teats. Milk appears as sweat on a platypus, but it's an aquatic mammal so it doesn't actually sweat at all .
• LEGO bricks withstand compression better than concrete . An ordinary plastic LEGO brick is able to support the weight of 375,000 other bricks before it fails. This, theoretically, would let you build a tower nearing 3.5km in height. Scaling this up to house-size bricks, however, would cost far too much .
• Martial artists who smile before the start of a match are more likely to lose . This could be as a smile can convey fear or submissiveness .
• It's almost impossible to get too much sugar from fresh fruit . While the sugar in fruit is mostly fructose and glucose (fructose is what's converted into fat in your body), you can't get too much sugar from fresh fruit . Fresh fruit contains a lot of fibre and water which slows down your digestion and makes you feel full.
• You don't like the sound of your own voice because of the bones in your head . This may be because the bones in our head make our voice sound deeper .
• A rainbow on Venus is called a glory . Appearing as a series of coloured concentric rings, these are caused by the interference of light waves within droplets , rather than the reflection, refraction and dispersion of light that makes a rainbow.
• Protons look like peanuts, rugby balls, bagels, and spheres . Protons come in all different shapes and sizes , with their appearance changing based on the speed of smaller particles within them: Quarks.
• Mirrors facing each other don't produce infinite reflections . Each reflection will be darker than the last and eventually fade into invisibility . Mirrors absorb a fraction of the energy of the light striking them. The total number of reflections mirrors can produce? A few hundred.
• There might be a cure for 'evil' . Well, a cure for psychopathy, anyway. Psychologists argue that aspects of psychopathy can be 'cured' by cognitive behavioural therapy , which is said to reduce violent offences by those with the condition. Preliminary research suggests that computer-based cognitive training could help a psychopath experience empathy and regret, too.
• All mammals get goosebumps . When your hair stands on end, tiny muscles contract at each hair's base which distorts the skin to create goosebumps. This process is called piloerection and is present in all mammals . Hair or fur is used to trap an insulating air layer.
• Football players spit so much because exercise increases the amount of protein in saliva . When you exercise, the amount of protein secreted into the saliva increases. A protein mucus named MUC5B makes your saliva thicker when you're exercising which makes it more difficult to swallow so we tend to spit more. It may occur during exercise because we breathe through our mouths more. MUC5B could activate to stop our mouths from drying out, therefore.
• Some animals display autistic-like traits . Autistic traits in animals include a tendency toward repetitive behaviour and atypical social habits.
• The biggest butterfly in the world has a 31cm wingspan . It belongs to the Queen Alexandra's Birdwing butterfly, which you can find in the forests of the Oro Province, in the east of Papua New Guinea.
• You remember more dreams when you sleep badly . Research suggests that if you sleep badly and wake up multiple times throughout the night you will be more likely to recall the content of any dreams you had. You are also more likely to remember a dream when woken from one.
• You could sweat when you're anxious to alert others . One theory suggests we've evolved to sweat whilst anxious to alert the brains of other people around us so they are primed for whatever it is that's making us anxious. Brain scans have revealed that when you sniff the sweat of a panic-induced person, regions of the brain that handle emotional and social signals light up. When you're anxious your sympathetic nervous system releases hormones including adrenaline, which activates your sweat glands.
• A lightning bolt is five times hotter than the surface of the Sun . The charge carried by a bolt of lightning is so intense that it has a temperature of 30,000°C (54,000°F).
• The longest anyone has held their breath underwater is over 24.5 minutes . The world record for breath-holding underwater was achieved by Croatian Budimir Šobat on 27 March 2021, who held his breath for a total of 24 minutes and 37 seconds. On average, a human can hold their breath between 30-90 seconds.
• The Moon is shrinking . But only very slightly – by about 50m (164ft) in radius over the last several hundred million years. Mysterious seismic activity, known as moonquakes, could be to blame.
• Dogs tilt their heads when you speak to them to better pinpoint familiar words . Your dog is tilting its head when you speak to it to pinpoint where noises are coming from more quickly . This is done to listen out more accurately for familiar words such as 'walkies' and helps them to better understand the tone of your voice. If a dog doesn't tilt its head that often (as those with shorter muzzles might), it's because it relies less on sound and more on sight.
• If the Earth doubled in size, trees would immediately fall over . This is because surface gravity would be doubled . It would also mean dog-size and larger animals would not be able to run without breaking a leg.
• Mercury, not Venus, is the closest planet to Earth on average . On average, Mercury is 1.04 astronomical units (AU) away from Earth compared to the 1.14 AU average distance between Earth and Venus. One AU is equal to the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. Venus still comes closest to Earth as part of its orbit around the Sun, however.
• Flamingoes aren’t born pink. They actually come into the world with grey/white feathers and only develop a pinkish hue after starting a diet of brine shrimp and blue-green algae. 
• You can smell ants . Many species of ants release strong-smelling chemicals when they’re angry, threatened or being squished. Trap-jaw ants release a chocolatey smell when annoyed, while citronella ants earn their name from the lemony odour they give off.
• People who eat whatever they want and stay slim have a slow metabolism, not fast . A skinny person tends to have less muscle mass than others, meaning their basal metabolic rate (BMR) is lower than those of a high muscle mass – this gives them a slow metabolism, not a fast one .
• Earth is 4.54 billion years old . Using radiometric dating, scientists have discovered that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old (give or take 50 million years). This makes our planet half the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (11-13 billion years old) and around a third of the age of the Universe (10-15 billion years old).
• Electrons might live forever . Scientists have estimated the minimum lifetime of the electron is about 6.6 × 1028 years – this is 66,000 ‘yottayears’. Since this is about 5 quintillion times the age of the Universe, even if electrons don’t live forever, they may as well do!
• Beavers don't actually live in dams . Technically, beavers live in a lodge that they build behind a dam, within a deep pool of water.
• The average dinosaur lifespan was surprisingly small. The Tyrannosaurus rex , for example, reached full size between 16-22 years old and lived up until 27-33 . The largest dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus and Diplodocus tended to live up to between 39-53 years old, maybe reaching the heights of 70.
• Someone left a family photo on the Moon. When Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke landed on the Moon in 1972, he decided to leave behind a photo of him, his two sons and his wife. The photo remains on the Moon to this day. 
• It rains methane on Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is the only moon in our Solar System with a dense atmosphere and the only body except Earth with liquid rivers, lakes and seas fed by rainfall. This rainfall isn’t water, though; it's liquid methane.
• Giraffes hum to communicate with each other. It’s thought that the low-frequency humming could be a form of ‘contact call’ between individuals who have been separated from their herd, helping them to find each other in the dark. Some researchers think they sleep talk too.
• Glass sponges can live for 15,000 years. This makes them one of the longest-living organisms on Earth . The immortal jellyfish, however, could theoretically live forever (but scientists aren’t sure)
• You have a 50 per cent chance of sharing a birthday with a friend. In any group of 23 people, two people will share a birthday , according to the maths. To find the probability of everyone in the group having a unique birthday, multiply all 23 probabilities together, giving 0.493. So the probability of a shared birthday is 1 - 0.493 = 0.507, or 50.7 per cent.
• Murder rates rise in summer. Ever feel angry or in a bad mood when the weather is hot? Well, you’re not alone. Violent crime goes up in hotter weather, and in the US, murder rates reportedly rise by 2.7 per cent over the summer.
• ' New car smell' is a mix of over 200 chemicals. These include the sickly-sweet, toxic hydrocarbons benzene and toluene.
• ‘Sea level’ isn’t actually level. As the strength of the force generated by the Earth’s spin is strongest at the equator, the average sea level bulges outward there, putting it further from the centre of the Earth than at the poles. Differences in the strength of the Earth’s gravity at different points also cause variation.
• You inhale 50 potentially harmful bacteria every time you breathe. Thankfully, your immune system is working hard all the time, so virtually all of these are promptly destroyed without you feeling a thing. Phew.
• You can see stars as they were 4,000 years ago with the naked eye. Without a telescope, all the stars we can see lie within about 4,000 light-years of us . That means at most you’re seeing stars as they were 4,000 years ago, around when the pyramids were being built in Egypt. 
• Plants came before seeds. According to the fossil record, early plants resembled moss and reproduced with single-celled spores. Multicellular seeds didn’t evolve for another 150 million years.
• Our dead cells are eaten by other cells in our body. Don’t worry; it’s meant to happen. When cells inside your body die , they’re scavenged by phagocytes – white blood cells whose job it is to digest other cells.
• Smells can pass through liquid. Please don’t try smelling underwater (your nose will not appreciate it), but smell does protrude through liquid . 
• Bats aren’t blind. Despite the famous idiom, bats can indeed see , but they still use their even more famous echolocation to find prey. 
• Pine trees can tell if it's about to rain. Next time you see a pine cone, take a close look. If it’s closed, that’s because the air is humid , which can indicate rain is on its way. 
• You can’t fold a piece of A4 paper more than eight times. As the number of layers doubles each time, the paper rapidly gets too thick and too small to fold. The current world paper-folding record belongs to California high school student Britney Gallivan, who in 2002 managed to fold a 1.2km-long piece of tissue paper 12 times.
• Laughing came before language. How do we know? Some researchers tickled baby apes, which, beyond being adorable, showed that they share the same structure as ours and likely arose in our common ancestors millions of years ago. Language came about much later . 
• Your brain burns 400-500 calories a day. That’s about a fifth of your total energy requirements . Most of this is concerned with the largely automatic process of controlling your muscles and processing sensory input, although some studies show solving tricky problems increases your brain's metabolic requirements too.
• 5 science "facts" that are completely wrong
• Eight mind-blowing facts about cats, according to science
• 7 black hole "facts" that aren't true

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Distinguishing Between Factual and Opinion Statements in the News

The politically aware, digitally savvy and those more trusting of the news media fare better; republicans and democrats both influenced by political appeal of statements, table of contents.

• Republicans and Democrats are more likely to think news statements are factual when they appeal to their side – even if they are opinions
• News brand labels in this study had a modest impact on separating factual statements from opinion
• 1. Overall, Americans identified more statements correctly than incorrectly, but sizable portions got most wrong
• 2. The ability to classify statements as factual or opinion varies widely based on political awareness, digital savviness and trust in news media
• 3. Republicans and Democrats more likely to classify a news statement as factual if it favors their side – whether it is factual or opinion
• 4. Americans overwhelmingly see statements they think are factual as accurate, mostly disagree with factual statements they incorrectly label as opinions
• 5. Tying statements to news outlets had limited impact on Americans’ capacity to identify statements as factual or opinion
• Acknowledgments
• Methodology
• Appendix A: Measuring capacity to classify statements as factual or opinion
• Appendix B: Detailed tables

In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements – statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context. A new Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 U.S. adults examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.

The findings from the survey, conducted between Feb. 22 and March 8, 2018, reveal that even this basic task presents a challenge. The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion.

For example, 36% of Americans with high levels of political awareness (those who are knowledgeable about politics and regularly get political news) correctly identified all five factual news statements, compared with about half as many (17%) of those with low political awareness. Similarly, 44% of the very digitally savvy (those who are highly confident in using digital devices and regularly use the internet) identified all five opinion statements correctly versus 21% of those who are not as technologically savvy. And though political awareness and digital savviness are related to education in predictable ways, these relationships persist even when accounting for an individual’s education level.

Trust in those who do the reporting also matters in how that statement is interpreted. Almost four-in-ten Americans who have a lot of trust in the information from national news organizations (39%) correctly identified all five factual statements, compared with 18% of those who have not much or no trust. However, one other trait related to news habits – the public’s level of interest in news – does not show much difference.

In addition to political awareness, party identification plays a role in how Americans differentiate between factual and opinion news statements. Both Republicans and Democrats show a propensity to be influenced by which side of the aisle a statement appeals to most. For example, members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side.

At this point, then, the U.S. is not completely detached from what is factual and what is not. But with the vast majority of Americans getting at least some news online, gaps across population groups in the ability to sort news correctly raise caution. Amid the massive array of content that flows through the digital space hourly, the brief dips into and out of news and the country’s heightened political divisiveness, the ability and motivation to quickly sort news correctly is all the more critical.

The differentiation between factual and opinion statements used in this study – the capacity to be proved or disproved by objective evidence – is commonly used by others as well, but may vary somewhat from how “facts” are sometimes discussed in debates – as statements that are true. 1 While Americans’ sense of what is true and false is important, this study was not intended as a knowledge quiz of news content. Instead, this study was intended to explore whether the public sees distinctions between news that is based upon objective evidence and news that is not.

To accomplish this, respondents were shown a series of news-related statements in the main portion of the study: five factual statements, five opinions and two statements that don’t fit clearly into either the factual or opinion buckets – termed here as “borderline” statements. Respondents were asked to determine if each was a factual statement (whether accurate or not) or an opinion statement (whether agreed with or not). For more information on how statements were selected for the study, see below .

How the study asked Americans to classify factual versus opinion-based news statements

In the survey, respondents read a series of news statements and were asked to put each statement in one of two categories:

• A factual statement , regardless of whether it was accurate or inaccurate. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that the statement could be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.
• An opinion statement , regardless of whether they agreed with the statement or not. In other words, they were to choose this classification if they thought that it was based on the values and beliefs of the journalist or the source making the statement, and could not definitively be proved or disproved based on objective evidence.

In the initial set, five statements were factual, five were opinion and two were in an ambiguous space between factual and opinion – referred to here as “borderline” statements. (All of the factual statements were accurate.) The statements were written and classified in consultation with experts both inside and outside Pew Research Center. The goal was to include an equal number of statements that would more likely appeal to the political right or to the political left, with an overall balance across statements. All of the statements related to policy issues and current events. The individual statements are listed in an expandable box at the end of this section, and the complete methodology, including further information on statement selection, classification, and political appeal, can be found here .

It’s important to explore what role political identification plays in how Americans decipher factual news statements from opinion news statements. To analyze this, the study aimed to include an equal number of statements that played to the sensitivities of each side, maintaining an overall ideological balance across statements. 2

Overall, Republicans and Democrats were more likely to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their side. Consider, for example, the factual statement “President Barack Obama was born in the United States” – one that may be perceived as more congenial to the political left and less so to the political right. Nearly nine-in-ten Democrats (89%) correctly identified it as a factual statement, compared with 63% of Republicans. On the other hand, almost four-in-ten Democrats (37%) incorrectly classified the left-appealing opinion statement “Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy” as factual, compared with about half as many Republicans (17%). 3

In a separate part of the study, respondents were shown eight different statements. But this time, most saw statements attributed to one of three specific news outlets: one with a left-leaning audience (The New York Times), one with a right-leaning audience (Fox News Channel) and one with a more mixed audience (USA Today). 4

Overall, attributing the statements to news outlets had a limited impact on statement classification, except for one case: Republicans were modestly more likely than Democrats to accurately classify the three factual statements in this second set when they were attributed to Fox News – and correspondingly, Democrats were modestly less likely than Republicans to do so. Republicans correctly classified them 77% of the time when attributed to Fox News, 8 percentage points higher than Democrats, who did so 69% of the time. 5 Members of the two parties were as likely as each other to correctly classify the factual statements when no source was attributed or when USA Today or The New York Times was attributed. Labeling statements with a news outlet had no impact on how Republicans or Democrats classified the opinion statements. And, overall, the same general findings about differences based on political awareness, digital savviness and trust also held true for this second set of statements.

When Americans call a statement factual they overwhelmingly also think it is accurate; they tend to disagree with factual statements they incorrectly label as opinions

The study probed one step further for the initial set of 12 statements. If respondents identified a statement as factual, they were then asked if they thought it was accurate or inaccurate. If they identified a statement to be an opinion, they were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with it.

When Americans see a news statement as factual, they overwhelmingly also believe it to be accurate. This is true for both statements they correctly and incorrectly identified as factual, though small portions of the public did call statements both factual and inaccurate.

When Americans incorrectly classified factual statements as opinions, they most often disagreed with the statement. When correctly classifying opinions as such, however, Americans expressed more of a mix of agreeing and disagreeing with the statement. About the study

Statement selection

This is Pew Research Center’s first step in understanding how people parse through information as factual or opinion. Creating the mix of statements was a multistep and rigorous process that incorporated a wide variety of viewpoints. First, researchers sifted through a number of different sources to create an initial pool of statements. The factual statements were drawn from sources including news organizations, government agencies, research organizations and fact-checking entities, and were verified by the research team as accurate. The opinion statements were adapted largely from public opinion survey questions. A final list of statements was created in consultation with Pew Research Center subject matter experts and an external board of advisers.

The goals were to:

• Pull together statements that range across a variety of policy areas and current events
• Strive for statements that were clearly factual and clearly opinion in nature (as well as some that combined both factual and opinion elements, referred to here as “borderline”)
• Include an equal number of statements that appealed to the right and left, maintaining an overall ideological balance

In the primary set of statements, respondents saw five factual, five opinion and two borderline statements. Factual statements that lend support to views held by more people on one side of the ideological spectrum (and fewer of those on the other side) were classified as appealing to the narrative of that side. Opinion statements were classified as appealing to one side if in recent surveys they were supported more by one political party than the other. Two of the statements (one factual and one opinion) were “neutral” and intended to appeal equally to the left and right.

How Pew Research Center asked respondents to categorize news statements as factual or opinion

As noted previously, respondents were first asked to classify each news statement as a factual statement or an opinion statement. Extensive testing of the question wording was conducted to ensure that respondents would not treat this task as asking if they agree with the statement or as a knowledge quiz. This is why, for instance, the question does not merely ask whether the statement is a factual or an opinion statement and instead includes explanatory language as follows: “Regardless of how knowledgeable you are about the topic, would you consider this statement to be a factual statement (whether you think it is accurate or not) OR an opinion statement (whether you agree with it or not)?” For more details on the testing of different question wordings, see Appendix A .

After classifying each statement as factual or opinion, respondents were then asked one of two follow-up questions. If they classified a statement as factual, they were then asked if they thought the statement was accurate or inaccurate. If they classified it as an opinion, they were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement.

Below are the 12 news statements that respondents were asked to categorize:

Factual statements

• Health care costs per person in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world
• President Barack Obama was born in the United States
• Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have some rights under the Constitution
• ISIS lost a significant portion of its territory in Iraq and Syria in 2017
• Spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest portion of the U.S. federal budget

Opinion statements

• Democracy is the greatest form of government
• Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy
• Abortion should be legal in most cases
• Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally are a very big problem for the country today
• Government is almost always wasteful and inefficient

Borderline statements

• Applying additional scrutiny to Muslim Americans would not reduce terrorism in the U.S.
• Voter fraud across the U.S. has undermined the results of our elections
• For example,  fact-checking organizations  have used this differentiation of a statement’s capacity to be proved or disproved as a way to determine whether a claim can be fact-checked and  schools  have used this approach to teach students to differentiate facts from opinions. ↩
• A statement was considered to appeal to the left or the right based on whether it lent support to political views held by more on one side of the ideological spectrum than the other. Various sources were used to determine the appeal of each statement, including news stories, statements by elected officials, and recent polling. ↩
• The findings in this study do not necessarily imply that one party is better able to correctly classify news statements as factual or opinion-based. Even though there were some differences between the parties (for instance, 78% of Democrats compared with 68% of Republicans who correctly classified at least three of five factual statements), the more meaningful finding is the tendency among both to be influenced by the possible political appeal of statements. ↩
• The classification of these three outlets’ audiences is based on previously reported survey data, the same data that was used to classify audiences for a recent study about coverage of the Trump administration. For more detail on the classification of the three news outlets, as well as the selection and analysis of this second set of statements, see the Methodology . At the end of the survey, respondents who saw news statements attributed to the news outlets were told, “Please note that the statements that you were shown in this survey were part of an experiment and did not actually appear in news articles of the news organizations.” ↩
• This analysis grouped together all of the times the 5,035 respondents saw a statement attributed to each of the outlets or no outlet at all. The results, then, are given as the “percent of the time” that respondents classified statements a given way when attributed to each outlet. For more details on what “percent of the time” means, see the Methodology . ↩

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The 10 Most Ridiculous Scientific Studies

I mportant news from the world of science: if you happen to suffer a traumatic brain injury, don’t be surprised if you experience headaches as a result. In other breakthrough findings: knee surgery may interfere with your jogging, alcohol has been found to relax people at parties, and there are multiple causes of death in very old people. Write the Nobel speeches, people, because someone’s going to Oslo!

Okay, maybe not. Still, every one of those not-exactly jaw-dropping studies is entirely real—funded, peer-reviewed, published, the works. And they’re not alone. Here—with their press release headlines unchanged—are the ten best from from science’s recent annals of “duh.”

Study shows beneficial effect of electric fans in extreme heat and humidity: You know that space heater you’ve been firing up every time the temperature climbs above 90º in August? Turns out you’ve been going about it all wrong. If you don’t have air conditioning, it seems that “fans” (which move “air” with the help of a cunning arrangement of rotating “blades”) can actually make you feel cooler. That, at least, was the news from a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) last February. Still to come: “Why Snow-Blower Use Declines in July.”

Study shows benefit of higher quality screening colonoscopies: Don’t you just hate those low-quality colonoscopies? You know, the ones when the doctor looks at your ears, checks your throat and pronounces, “That’s one fine colon you’ve got there, friend”? Now there’s a better way to go about things, according to JAMA, and that’s to be sure to have timely, high quality screenings instead. That may be bad news for “Colon Bob, Your $5 Colonoscopy Man,” but it’s good news for the rest of us.

Holding on to the blues: Depressed individuals may fail to decrease sadness: This one apparently came as news to the folks at the Association for Psychological Science and they’ve got the body of work to stand behind their findings. They’re surely the same scientists who discovered that short people often fail to increase inches, grouchy people don’t have enough niceness and folks who wear dentures have done a terrible job of hanging onto their teeth. The depression findings in particular are good news, pointing to exciting new treatments based on the venerable “Turn that frown upside down” method.

Quitting smoking after heart attack reduces chest pain, improves quality of life: Looks like you can say goodbye to those friendly intensive care units that used hand out packs of Luckies to post-op patients hankering for a smoke. Don’t blame the hospitals though, blame those buzz-kills folks at the American Heart Association who are responsible for this no-fun finding. Next in the nanny-state crosshairs: the Krispy Kreme booth at the diabetes clinic.

Older workers bring valuable knowledge to the job: Sure they bring other things too: incomprehensible jokes, sensible shoes, the last working Walkman in captivity. But according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology , they also bring what the investigators call “crystallized knowledge,” which comes from “knowledge born of experience.” So yes, the old folks in your office say corny things like “Show up on time,” “Do an honest day’s work,” and “You know that plan you’ve got to sell billions of dollars worth of unsecured mortgages, bundle them together, chop them all up and sell them to investors? Don’t do that.” But it doesn’t hurt to humor them. They really are adorable sometimes.

Being homeless is bad for your health: Granted, there’s the fresh air, the lean diet, the vigorous exercise (no sitting in front of the TV for you!) But living on the street is not the picnic it seems. Studies like the one in the Journal of Health Psychology show it’s not just the absence of a fixed address that hurts, but the absence of luxuries like, say, walls and a roof. That’s especially true in winter—and spring, summer and fall too, follow-up studies have found. So quit your bragging, homeless people. You’re no healthier than the rest of us.

The more time a person lives under a democracy, the more likely she or he is to support democracy: It’s easy to fall for a charming strong-man—that waggish autocrat who promises you stability, order and no silly distractions like civil liberties and an open press. Soul-crushing annihilation of personal freedoms? Gimme’ some of that, big boy. So it came as a surprise that a study in Science found that when you give people even a single taste of the whole democracy thing, well, it’s like what they say about potato chips, you want to eat the whole bag. But hey, let’s keep this one secret. Nothing like a peevish dictator to mess up a weekend.

Statistical analysis reveals Mexican drug war increased homicide rates: That’s the thing about any war—the homicide part is kind of the whole point. Still, as a paper in The American Statistician showed, it’s always a good idea to crunch the numbers. So let’s run the equation: X – Y = Z, where X is the number of people who walked into the drug war alive, Y is the number who walked out and Z is, you know, the dead guys. Yep, looks like it adds up. (Don’t forget to show your work!)

Middle-aged congenital heart disease survivors may need special care: Sure, but they may not, too. Yes you could always baby them, like the American Heat Association recommends. But you know what they say: A middle-aged congenital heart disease survivor who gets special care is a lazy middle-aged congenital heart disease survivor. Heck, when I was a kid, our middle-aged congenital heart disease survivors worked for their care—and they thanked us for it too. This is not the America I knew.

Scientists Discover a Difference Between the Sexes: Somewhere, in the basement warrens of Northwestern University, dwell the scientists who made this discovery—androgynous beings, reproducing by cellular fission, they toiled in darkness, their light-sensitive eye spots needing only the barest illumination to see. Then one day they emerged blinking into the light, squinted about them and discovered that the surface creatures seemed to come in two distinct varieties. Intrigued, they wandered among them—then went to a kegger and haven’t been seen since. Spring break, man; what are you gonna’ do?

Read about changes to Time.com

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected]