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The sympathetic nervous system — our fight-or-flight response — kicks in when we face a big challenge or risk. When we’re relaxed, our parasympathetic nervous system takes over. Together these two systems make up the autonomic nervous system.

Over the past two decades, electricity from renewable sources, such as wind and solar, has been on the rise. Devices known as grid-forming inverters will likely play a major role in getting renewable energy safely into the power grid.

Fossil research has been plagued by parachute paleontology. This happens when scientists from high-income countries travel to low-income countries to study or collect fossils but don’t involve local experts. Sometimes foreign scientists skirt local laws about exporting fossils or buy them under sketchy or even illegal circumstances.

To really understand Earth, you need to travel thousands of kilometers beneath our feet. Starting at the center, Earth is composed of four distinct layers.

Alcohol-related deaths have increased yearly over the last 20 years. From 2019 to 2020, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death rate from alcohol use rose sharply — at a much greater rate than in recent years.

Drastic cuts to greenhouse emissions are needed to prevent even more catastrophic consequences than the rising sea levels, extreme weather and other impacts our warming world has already faced. Scientists have mapped out potential paths to net-zero, when greenhouse gases emitted are balanced by those removed. This includes decreases in emissions from transportation, industry and other sectors.

Space rocks that have smashed into our planet have left impact craters. Many of the craters have been wiped away by erosion, but scientists have cataloged the survivors, including some that are over one billion years old.

Scientists have had a rough draft of the human genome for some 20 years. They hoped to use it for precision medicine, treatments based on an individual’s DNA. But an understanding of the differences between different people’s DNA has been hampered by a lack of diversity in genetic studies known as genome-wide association studies.

Global temperatures are at an all-time high due to the compounded effects of climate change and El Nino. Oceans around the world are warming at an alarming rate. In summer 2023, some 40 percent of the world’s oceans were affected by heat waves.

In August of 2018, scientists published research showing how air pollution shaves off about a year on average from human life expectancy. In more polluted regions of Asia and Africa, lives are shortened by 1.5–2 years on average. Loss in life expectancy rises with increasing concentrations of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5).

According to a 2022 study, people in the United States often included Thanksgiving as an event important to the country’s foundation along with the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas, the Civil War and British colonization. But the events in most people’s narrative of the first Thanksgiving run contrary to history. Thanksgiving myths abound because their memory is rooted in story. While such origin stories tend to unify people, they sometimes misrepresent the truth. Tidy tales of history sometimes appear in books and museum exhibits, preserving the group narrative and identity.

In February 2024, a team of researchers collected 580,000 records on domestic dogs in the United Kingdom. On average, dogs live roughly 10 to 14 years. Overall, dogs from pure breeds that are small and have a long nose seemed to have longer life spans. But some flat-faced dogs, such as Tibetan mastiffs, had an average life span of 13 years.