February 8, 2024: We need to fix hospice care and study sex in space. And the color of the year goes to... —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | The official color of 2024 is Peach Fuzz, according to the Pantone Color Institute (a group that sets standards of colors across industries and forecasts color trends). The warm peachy color is reminiscent of a sweet peach bellini, or a sunrise. And it's found everywhere in nature.
Why this is cool: After color trends are announced, designers and marketers often incorporate the color of the year into their products. Interestingly, color is quite a subjective experience. The human visual system is particularly attuned to greens and highly attentive to reds. But beyond that, any aesthetic associations with colors are likely picked up through experience and culture.
What the experts say: This year's softly bright shade "sort of captures the zeitgeist: moving forward, hoping to focus more on positivity and warmth," says Lauren Labrecque, a marketing researcher specializing in color at the University of Rhode Island. | | | Pantone's Color of the Year for 2024 is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz. Credit: Pantone | | | Pink skunk clownfish. Credit: Jodi Jacobson/Getty Images | | | The volcanic mountain range Kerlingarfjöll, located in the highlands of Iceland. Credit: Mumemories/Getty Images
| | | Farmers sort and package harvested peaches at a farm on May 20, 2023 in Dao County, Yongzhou City, Hunan Province of China. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
| | | The United States is the richest nation in the world but ranks rather abysmally on the quality of end-of-life care. A 2022 analysis of how well countries around the world deliver end-of-life care ranked the U.S. 43rd out of the 81 countries assessed. Nearly three quarters of hospice agencies in the U.S. operate on a for-profit basis, and many have been found to be rife with corruption and wrong-doing. We need to fix hospice care, write the editors of Scientific American, in the February issue of the magazine.
Why this matters: Of the roughly three million Americans who die every year, around half now do so in hospice care. The sector has become so lucrative that in recent years private equity firms and publicly traded corporations have been snapping up previously nonprofit hospices at record rates.
What can be done: The nonprofit Center for Economic and Policy Research outlined recommendations for reforming the hospice system. They include revising the policies to account for the involvement of private equity firms in hospice care, better screening of care facilities and closing up loopholes that corrupt hospice management exploit to increase profits. | | | The Big Bang Sex in space has long been somewhat of a taboo subject at NASA and other agencies. But the private space industry is booming, and civilians of the future may make up a large percentage of space travelers. "If we want to settle another world or establish ourselves and travel long distances and become a spacefaring civilization, we need to deal with reproduction, obviously, but we also need to deal with sex," says Simon Dubé, a research psychologist at the Kinsey Institute. In today's episode of Science, Quickly, senior editor for space and physics, Lee Billings, talks to experts about the state of research on sex in space. | 13 min listen | | | • In January Taylor Swift became the latest high-profile target of nonconsensual deepfake images. It's time for regulations that ban this kind of abusive AI content, cybersafety advocates say. | 5 min read | | | • Scientists are now inspecting fragments from the asteroid Bennu, which are thought to be leftover objects from when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. | 5 min read | | | • Revelations in the last 50 years of cases of governmental secrecy and deception coupled with the narrative of an "invisible government" peddled by today's populist politicians fuels conspiracy theories, write Kathryn Olmsted and Simon Willmetts, professors of history and intelligence and security, respectively. "We have focused our gaze pejoratively on the 'basket of deplorables' who tend to believe such theories, and ignored the official sources and government policies that first produced these widespread anxieties," they say. | 5 min read | | | Is there Peach Fuzz in your life? Send me your favorite Peach Fuzz photos or memories. And check out the article for more beautiful photography featuring the color of the year. As we learned yesterday in Today in Science, color conceptualization is impacted by language. It will be interesting to see how Peach Fuzz is adopted around the world in 2024. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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