Harper’s Findings Harper’s Index

harper’s

FINDINGS

Photons in plasma were accelerated to 1.3 times the speed of light, concrete buildings can be built to serve as batteries, and the snow covering Greenland was getting darker and older. Terrestrial middle latitudes cooled by around 6 degrees Celsius during the Last Glacial Maximum. Archaeologists concluded that the Aqueduct of Valens had a second channel for maintenance, but were unable to progress with more research after treasure hunters dynamited a crucial span in search of gold. Half of Guadeloupe’s squamates went extinct after 1492, and the population decline among Amazonian people may have begun three centuries before the Great Dying. The prominent erection of the Cerne Abbas Giant may have been chalked on in the seventeenth century. Voyager 1 was transmitting data on the interstellar medium at a speed of about 160 bps, and 128 baby bobtail squid were sent to the International Space Station. Scientists have been under estimating the tree farts of ghost forests.

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Risk factors for nongenetic colorectal cancer include red meat, low education, too much alcohol, and too little alcohol. In an emergency, mammals can absorb oxygen through the rectum. Bears who rub against more trees have more mates and more cubs. For the first time in three millennia, Tasmanian devils were born on the Australian mainland. The parrot- poaching decisions of Indonesian smugglers are determined by beauty, and the global bird population was estimated to be fifty billion. Despite its taste for car tires and windshield wipers, the flightless kea has evolved to avoid humans. Early-modern Germans’ heritable immunities were strengthened by plague pressure. Tsimane adults, transported out of the jungle and analyzed with CT scanners in the Bolivian city of Trinidad, were found to be more resilient to brain aging, and Italians aged 105 and older were found to be good at repairing their own DNA. An ascidian found in the Gulf of Aqaba can regenerate its bodies when cut into thirds. Only a third of young adults would take a pill that freezes them at their current age forever. Too many English children were pleading guilty. e

The vervet monkey colony next to Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport was confirmed to have originated with a 1948 escape from a chimpanzee farm. Alloparenting among primates co-evolved with complex facial expressions, and participants from a range of language backgrounds can identify the meaning behind novel vocalizations from speakers of other languages, particularly those for snake, hunt, water, tiger, child, eat, and sleep. Researchers warned that large-scale language models have “no there there.” Patients are less likely to take medical advice from an AI if it knows their name. A new trap-jaw ant was given the non binary Linnaean name Strumigenys ayersthey by an entomologist and Michael Stipe. The consumption of pink drinks allows runners to go farther and faster. Across cultures, and even at subpathological levels, narcissism is linked to aggression. American men are considerably more likely than women to think they could defeat a goose in unarmed combat. Researchers identified the faculty of decision acuity and were optimistic about a targeted treatment for mild, frequent blows to the head. Aphantasiacs, whose inability to form mental imagery may be acquirable through stem-cell transplants, were found to be less susceptible to both the Ganzflicker pseudo-hallucination and to ghost stories. The point of dreams may be their strangeness.

INDEX

% conservatives are more likely to want to travel to the past than to the future: 7 By which a U.S. liberal is more likely to want to travel to the future: 70 % of who say their personality has changed over the course of the pandemic: 86 Who think they have become smarter: 70 Number of new words that Larousse is adding to its French dictionary this year: 170 Number of these words that are related to COVID-19: 50 Est. % by which the COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. exceeds the reported figures: 55 By which the worldwide death toll does: 122 Chance that an American has a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in the CDC: 1 in 2 Number of individuals responsible for 3/4 of the anti-vaccine content on Facebook: 12 % of U.S. employers requiring that their workers get the COVID-19 vaccine: 4 % of countries in which China’s image has improved since the pandemic: 56 % of people who believe the U.S. is a “threat to democracy” in their country: 44 Who believe China is: 38 % by which the frequency of power failures in the U.S. has increased since 2015: 146 Estimated amount of stimulus money that went to fossil-fuel companies under the CARES Act: $8,240,000,000 Projected rank of 2021 among the years with the largest spikes in U.S. carbon emissions: 1 Estimated area, in square miles, of lost natural forest that has been regrown around the world since 2000: 227,414 Of permanent tree-cover loss over that same period: 583,014 % by which the Brazilian Amazon rainforest released more carbon than it trapped between 2010 and 2019: 18 Number of 100 cities most vulnerable to climate change worldwide that are in Asia: 99 Portion of cities worldwide that lack financial resources to adapt to climate change: 1/4 Minimum number of major cities that have appointed chief heat officers to address rising temperatures: 3 % change in the number of divorces in China after it imposed a mandatory thirty-day “cooling-off period”: –72 % of fathers working from home who say that doing so improved their mental health: 71 Of mothers: 41 Est. number of charter schools that have opened up in vacant retail properties: 200 % of new chain stores that are either a Dollar General, Family Dollar, or Dollar Tree: 39 % change last year in the employment rate for new college graduates: –12 % of U.S. gig workers who say that the money they earn is an “essential” or “important” part of their finances: 56 Who have performed work for which they did not receive payment: 29 Min. amount spent by U.S. businesses on corporate swag last year: $18,630,000,000 Estimated number of registered cryptocurrency lobbyists: 264 Estimated amount U.S. consumers reported losing in cryptocurrency scams between October 2020 and March 2021: $80,000,000 In scams that involved people impersonating Elon Musk: $2,000,000 % of people of Asian descent in British Columbia who were the victim of a hate crime in the past year: 43 % of Americans who cannot name a single prominent Asian American: 42 % of top-grossing films released between 2007 and 2019 that featured an Asian or Pacific Islander in a leading role: 3 Portion of those roles filled by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson: 1/3

SOURCES:1,2 CBS News (NYC); 3,4 Oracle (Austin, Texas); 5,6 Éditions Larousse (Paris); 7,8 Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Seattle); 9 Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Boston); 10 Center for Countering Digital Hate (Washington); 11 ManpowerGroup (Milwaukee); 12 International Federation of Journalists (Brussels); 13,14 Latana (Berlin); 15 Brian Stone Jr., Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta); 16 Climate Nexus (NYC); 17 U.S. Energy Information Administration (Washington); 18 Trillion Trees (Cambridge, England); 19 World Resources Institute (Washington); 20 Xiangming Xiao, University of Oklahoma (Norman); 21 Maplecroft (Bath, England); 22 Carbon Disclosure Project (NYC); 23 The Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Washington); 24 Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (Beijing); 25,26 McKinsey & Company (NYC); 27 National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (Washington); 28 Coresight Research (NYC); 29–31 Pew Research Center (Washington); 32 Advertising Specialty Institute (Trevose, Pa.); 33 ProPublica (Washington); 34,35 Federal Trade Commission (Washington); 36 Insights West (Vancouver, British Columbia); 37 Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change (Palo Alto, Calif.); 38,39 Annenberg Inclusion Initiative (Los Angeles).