science

People were significantly more likely to give up their seat to a pregnant woman if someone in a Batman costume was present.

Candy wrappers. Balloons. Grocery bags. Every day, the equivalent of 2,000 full garbage trucks worth of plastic gets dumped in the world's oceans.

Scientists have long known that plastic waste is harmful to marine life. A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows much plastic a marine animal has to eat for it to be lethal.

"What surprised me the most is how little it takes to become deadly," said Britta Baechler, a co-author of the study and director of Ocean Plastics Research at the Ocean Conservancy.

Less than three sugar cubes' worth of plastic could kill an Atlantic puffin. Two baseballs' worth would do in a sea turtle. The equivalent of a soccer ball is enough to off a seal or dolphin.

Every time I read a new article about bees it makes me realize just how little we understand biological intelligence. Today's find: bees can distinguish split-second flashes of light, revealing surprising timing abilities and advanced cognitive flexibility.

Gross domestic product (GDP) was never designed to be a measure of societal well-being. It tracks only market transactions, conflates costs and benefits, and ignores the distribution of income, the contributions of household labour and volunteer work, and social and environmental costs and benefits.

In the decades after the Second World War, GDP growth functioned as a reasonable proxy for well-being when rebuilding economies and increasing production and consumption were the main priorities. However, since about 1950, which some call the Anthropocene era, ecological limits, inequality and declining social cohesion have restricted further improvements in well-being...

Measuring and modelling what truly matters, not just market transactions, is now essential. Processes are under way to develop indicators that move beyond GDP. In May, the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres appointed a High-Level Expert Group to develop such measures, with a focus on balancing economic, social and environmental dimensions of well-being. This initiative builds on the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): target 19 of SDG17 commits governments to adopt beyond-GDP metrics by 2030.

...“So far there is no hint telling us that we should throw quantum field theory away; actually, it’s the opposite,” said Luca Buoninfante, a theoretical physicist at Radboud University in the Netherlands whose calculations have helped shore up the old theory. When you apply the standard quantum field theory to gravity, you don’t just get a unique theory called quadratic gravity, he said. “You also get new predictions.”...

...Perhaps effects occasionally sneak ahead of their causes at the microscopic level, for instance. And perhaps negative-energy “ghost” particles that arise in quadratic gravity can exist safely in the equations without creating paradoxes in experiments...

...The surprising successes of quadratic gravity hint that gravity may yet turn out to have a blurry picture that works well enough after all. Below a certain spatial scale, it may be that any complicated details — whether those are strings, loops or nothing at all — can be ignored, and you’ll still get a fully consistent theory. If that’s the case, physicists can accurately predict how gravitons collide and how the universe inflated without worrying about what’s truly going on at the smallest scales. “It may or may not be the ultimate theory,” Donoghue said. But maybe “it becomes a closed, self-consistent layer of reality.”...

peaks overnight on Nov. 16-17, when up to 10 meteors per hour may be visible radiating from a patch of sky in the constellation Leo, according to the American Meteor Society.

An MIT neuroscientist proposes that brain waves perform analog computations that give rise to thought and consciousness, and that the restructuring and strenghening of the neural connectome is a separate function that affects future thought but is too slow to be our main processing method.