Jessica Irvine 
Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the Harvard computer scientist has three children who among them have celebrated more than two dozen birthdays. He knows what it’s like to stand with a knife before a layered masterpiece, frosted with buttercream and chocolate …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter A new study has shed light on how the number of sexual partners British people have changes as they age, and new findings have surprised researchers. The study …
Topline Access to hormone therapy could result in less depression, lower suicide risk and decreased gender dysphoria for transgender adults, according to a study published Thursday, complementing other studies suggesting similar help for transgender youth, as the issue of “gender-affirming” care continues to be highly politicized. Over 20 states have restricted or banned access to …
Credit: Monash University The Behavioural Roadmap to Circular Consumption, developed by Monash University’s BehaviourWorks Australia, identifies where policy-makers and industry can intervene in the production–consumption cycle to create change, reduce Australia’s material footprint, and encourage an efficient use of limited resources as the most effective way to confront the ongoing waste crisis. Different from a …
CrossingsBen GoldfarbW.W. Norton & Co., $30 Nearly 65 million kilometers of roadway crisscross the Earth — enough to encircle the planet more than 1,600 times — and that number will likely double by 2050. These roads have intruded into even the most remote corners of the world, and that has come at a cost: Vehicles …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Scientists have managed to generate electricity from the deadly E. coli bacteria in a ‘groundbreaking’ breakthrough. And the finding could revolutionise both waste management and energy production. Bioelectronic …
Hurricane Lee from a satellite perspective NASA, NOAA, and U.S. Navy Hurricane Lee has a rather common name, but it is far from a common storm. At the time of writing, it is a powerful and rare Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic basin. Mike Fisher, a colleague at the University of Miami and the …
Improving climate models and predictions by learning from observational and simulated data. To improve climate models, model components encoding domain-specific knowledge should learn from diverse climate statistics that are obtained from Earth observations or regional high-resolution simulations. Ideally, the model components learn jointly, and have their joint uncertainties quantified, to reveal and reduce compensating errors …
Topline The chemically addictive fatty, salty and sweet foods that make up 68% of the American food supply have historically been pushed to consumers by the nation’s leading tobacco sales companies, new research shows, suggesting the same companies responsible for what has been called a “smoking epidemic” could also be partially blamed for a decline …
Pteropus rufus, the Malagasy Flying Fox, in flight over Madagascar. Credit: Michael McGuire (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) A small team of biologists and evolutionists from the University of Chicago, York University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Exeter reports why bats carry viruses that cause higher fatality rates when jumping to humans than …