If DF2 contained as much dark matter as astronomers would normally expect for such a galaxy, the dark matter would boost the orbital speeds of those star clusters. Examining seven star clusters orbiting DF4, Danieli and her co-workers found they are moving languidly, suggesting there is very little or no dark matter in the galaxy. One thing is clear: If confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, the galaxies’ lack of dark matter would conclusively show the stuff is separable from stars, gas, dust and other regular matter, and would further bolster the case for dark matter’s existence.

That’s according to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research group that published its annual temperature analysis on Thursday. The United Kingdom’s Met Office and Berkeley Earth also planned to release their own findings that day. The ongoing federal shutdown has indefinitely delayed the NASA and NOAA reports, so Berkeley Earth decided to go ahead with its report.

A 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report, which synthesized all the available research on marijuana, concluded in part: “There is substantial evidence of a statistical association between cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia or other psychoses, with the highest risk among the most frequent users.” An important piece of Berenson’s argument is that rates of marijuana use have risen at around the same time as an increase in diagnoses of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. Nonetheless, Gladwell offers up Berenson’s same misleading statistics on violence without interrogating their accuracy, mentions two studies suggesting a gateway effect while ignoring plenty of contradictory research, and highlights some data generated by a New York University professor and friend of Berenson’s, which, while they may be valid, have not been peer reviewed or otherwise assessed by experts.

Nicole Long
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Head of the Long Term Memory Lab at the University of Virginia
Exactly why some experiences stand the test of time and others fade from memory is an on-going topic of research across a number of psychology, cognitive, and neuroscience labs as experiences can be forgotten for a number of reasons. Jason Ozubko
Assistant Professor, Psychology, SUNY Geneseo, whose work examines the cognitive and neuropsychological properties of human memory
The main reason we forget is due to a phenomenon called interference, which is when new information interferes with previous things you’ve learned. This is efficient for the brain, because when you encode new experiences in the context of older things, you can sort of piggyback your new experiences on top of your older memories.

The work of the antidiet crowd asks anyone touched by diet culture to entertain the possibility that body weight doesn’t, in itself, cause health issues. At the same time—rather than sadistically goad people in bigger bodies into some mythical food regimen that turns them thin for good—it “poses serious risks to their psychological and physical health,” according to a 2010 paper in the American Journal of Public Health. According to studies in the American Journal of Physiology–­Endocrinology and Metabolism (2014) and Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (2016), food restriction of almost any form—famine, elimination diets, wellness diets—routinely upsets hormonal regulation, potentially setting off serious mental and physical health problems and, paradoxically, weight gain.

Dölen, who recently made headlines for her work giving MDMA to octopuses, would love to see neuroscientists band together to create a periodic table of the brain. Attempts to create general rules for how certain brain properties can predict intelligence often fall apart, Dölen explained. This huge data set also allows them to look at relationships between neuron number and intelligence, longevity, senility, sociality, etc.”
Dölen compared these insights to the comparative approaches behind the periodic table—once you find the proper patterns and line everything up, the table itself can make predictions. Dölen hopes a massive catalog of the properties of as many brains from as many species as possible, arranged in some pre-determined order, will reveal revolutionary insights about how brains work.

Self-deception belongs to a family of concepts involving psychological manipulation, such as wishful thinking, repression, denial and dissociation (emotionally removing oneself from a traumatic experience to avoid confronting it). Strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow us to conceal our true nature even from ourselves
Somewhere on the scale between extremely damaging and totally insignificant self-deception we find examples that resonate. Skeptics about self-deception claim that any genuine examples would need to satisfy impossible conditions, such as the knowing-dupe or the contradictory belief conditions. For the skeptic’s defeat we must show either: (1) that the fact of somebody holding inconsistent beliefs is reconcilable with the idea of a unified centre of conscious beliefs; or (2) that the skeptic misconstrues the conditions under which self-deception occurs.

In 1919 Edward Rosenow from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, isolated several bacteria from the sputum and lungs of flu patients in Rochester, formulated a vaccine that contained five different kinds of bacteria, and doled it out to 100,000 people. For the first several years the influenza vaccine contained only one strain, the influenza A virus, because, as far as anyone knew, that was the only kind of influenza out there. For the 2016-7 flu season, most of the vaccine doses manufactured in the US targeted four different strains. One study compared 18 different groups over 10 influenza seasons and found that the vaccine reduced the overall winter mortality rate in older people by an astonishing 50%.

At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously. Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.

The pivotal moment in Pacific archaeological history happened in 1952, when a team of researchers found a cache of dentate-stamped pots at a place called Lapita in New Caledonia, a French collectivity to the southwest of Vanuatu. Along the way, they encountered populations of “Papuans” — a generic shorthand for highly distinct groups of people who had been in the Papua New Guinea region for 40,000 years. Finally, the people now associated with Lapita sailed into the blankness of the open ocean for the first time, crossing the Remote Oceania divide to Vanuatu and, from there, outward to the farthest reaches of the Pacific. Archaeologists differed, often bitterly, on the details, but as Reich describes it in his book, the prevailing opinion was that “the Lapita archaeological culture was forged during a period of intense exchange between people ultimately originating in the farming center of China (via Taiwan) and New Guineans.”