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The "polluter elite" are disproportionately driving climate change, according to a new report — with the wealthiest 1% of people in the world putting out as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds. The report, by The Guardian, the international charity Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, found that climate change and "extreme inequality" have become "interlaced, fused together and driving one another." The report also found that the richest 10% percent of people worldwide made up roughly half of emissions that year. "It would take about 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99% to produce as much carbon...

A gene from Denisovans makes people predisposed to mental health issues The gene was passed down to humans about 60,000 years ago in Asia Humans having sex with a now-extinct subspecies they met in Asia some 60,000 years ago could be the reason you have depression, a new study has claimed. Researchers discovered a gene variant linked to the crossbreeding of humans and Denisovans which they believe affects our mood. Those with the variant have lower levels of zinc in the body - a nutrient which studies increasingly show is associated with mood and happiness. Scientists said SLC30A9 is the...

People who don’t get vaccinated against COVID-19 are putting themselves in danger and also are creating a “disproportionate” threat to the health of vaccinated people, even in places with high vaccination rates, says a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The study by University of Toronto researchers used computer modeling based on the province of Ontario to predict infection rates when unvaccinated and vaccinated people mixed to varying degrees. The researchers worked in factors such as vaccine effectiveness, baseline immunity among the unvaccinated, and infection recovery rates. Unvaccinated people were always at a higher risk of infection, the...

Just when the world thought it might have COVID-19 under control, the new variant Omicron began spreading through the population faster than any variant seen before. The variant has been reported in 77 countries, though is likely in more, many European countries have re-entered lockdown, and early data suggests that Omicron is magnitudes more infectious than both the original COVID-19 strain and Delta. Now, new preliminary research, currently under peer-review, is illuminating just how much more transmissible Omicron is, and the mechanisms that allow it to outcompete delta. The study, led by researchers from the LKS Faculty of Medicine at...

COVID-19 cases in children are up 84 percent in the past week, a new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] reported on Wednesday, with 72,000 new instances of the virus reported as of July 29, up from 39,000 cases reported the week prior. AAP said it had teamed up with Children’s Hospitals of America to help collect and share data about pediatric cases of the virus, which have been only 14.3 percent of the total cumulative cases, the study says. That share rose to 19 percent for the week ending July 29. Since the pandemic began, 4.2 million...

..The authors estimated that the drugs put patients at up to 45% higher risk of dying from Covid-19 compared with underlying health issues. ... "Treatment with chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine does not benefit patients with COVID-19," said Mandeep Mehra, lead author of the study and executive director of the Brigham and Women's Hospital Center for Advanced Heart Disease in Boston. "Instead, our findings suggest it may be associated with an increased risk of serious heart problems and increased risk of death." ... Despite Mr Trump's enthusiasm for using hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 treatment, his own government's Food and Drug Administration warns against...

Conspiracy theories claiming COVID-19 was engineered in a lab as part of a biological attack on the United States have been gaining traction online in recent weeks, but a new study on the origins of the virus has concluded that the pandemic-causing strain developed naturally. An analysis of the evidence, according to the findings first published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, shows that the novel coronavirus "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," with the researchers concluding "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." "There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy...

The number of fake political news stories on Facebook has surged as the 2020 presidential race heats up, according to Avaaz, a global advocacy group that tracks misinformation. The group, which released its findings on the issue Wednesday, looked at the 100 most-viral fake political stories on Facebook in 2019. In total, those 100 stories were posted more than 2.3 million times and grossed an estimated 158.9 million views. For comparison, just under 140 million Americans voted in the 2016 presidential election. According to Avaaz's report, fake news stories that went against Democrats and liberals made up 62 percent of...

"As the body of research evidence has grown over the last twenty years, psychologists in general have become increasingly skeptical that repressed memories even exist, but a new study, published this week in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that researchers and practitioners hold different beliefs about whether such memories occur and whether they can be accurately recalled."

As President Donald Trump prepares to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally, a new national study shows undocumented workers pump billions of dollars into Connecticut’s economy each year. The New American Economy, a coalition of mayors and business leaders who support “sensible” immigration reform, found that the nearly 130,000 undocumented Connecticut residents pay $397 million in annual federal, state and local taxes, account for $3.1 billion in household income and represent $2.7 billion in spending power. “This research proves what we’ve known for years: Immigrants are a boom to our local economy and in every community in America,”...

As social media sites like Facebook and Snapchat move to eliminate “fake news” reports from their sites, researchers from Stanford and New York Universities say Americans can be sure of one thing: the phenomenon did not affect the results of the presidential election.The new study released last month investigated the influence that fake news may have had on President Trump’s victory.NYU economics professor Hunt Allcott and Stanford economics professor Matthew Gentzkow led the research. The pair ran a series of tests to determine which fake news articles were circulated, how much of it was circulated, and the amount of voters...

Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions drown the shores of the Black Sea 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter? A geologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and two Romanian colleagues report in the January issue of Quaternary Science Reviews that, if the flood occurred at all, it was much smaller than previously proposed by other researchers. Using sediment cores from the delta of the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea, the researchers determined sea level was approximately 30 meters below present levels—rather than the 80 meters others hypothesized. “We don’t...

Revised Formula Puts 1 in 6 Americans in Poverty Hope Yen, Associated Press Writer – Oct 20 WASHINGTON – The level of poverty in America is even worse than first believed. A revised formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations show that approximately 47.4 million Americans last year lived in poverty, 7 million more than the government's official figure. The disparity occurs because of differing formulas the Census Bureau and the National Academy of Science use for calculating the poverty rate. The NAS formula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 percent, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans,...

While U.S. broadband providers continue to boost speeds for their subscribers, they still are falling behind the broadband deployment efforts of many other nations, according to survey of 230,000 U.S. Internet users. The survey, conducted by the Communications Workers of America, indicates also that population density can be a factor in providing broadband " Rhode Island, the smallest state geographically in the union, has the fastest median download speed with 6.8 Mbps while Alaska, the largest, has the slowest at 0.8 Mbps. Internet users in the survey took the CWA's Speed Matters Speed Test. The median download speed in the...