October 30, 2024: People misjudge the morality of the opposing political party, you can learn to echolocate in just 10 weeks, and 2024 looks like it'll be the hottest year on record. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | • An examination of 47,282 tree species finds that one in three tree species are at risk of extinction. | 2 min read | | | • Global temperatures through September point to 2024 topping 2023 as the hottest year on record. How hot the future gets depends in part on the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. | 4 min read | | | Amanda Montañez; Source: Gavin A. Schmidt/NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (data) | | | Do spiders dream? In more than 15 species of spider, researchers have observed behaviors consistent with other animals in REM sleep. It's the first investigation of the arachnids' sleep behavior and suggests that sleep is something universal to most creatures on Earth. Watch the full video here. | | | People's beliefs about members of the opposing political party are often wrong. In a national survey, researchers asked more than 600 participants who identified as either Democrat or Republican what they thought of six basic moral transgressions: committing wrongful imprisonment, tax fraud, embezzlement or animal abuse, watching child pornography and cheating on a spouse. Nearly every respondent said they didn't approve of the acts. BUT, when asked what they thought members of the other party thought, on average, Democrats and Republicans thought about 23 percent of their political opponents would approve of basic moral wrongs.
What the experts say: "Sometimes we need a reminder that they are like us," write morality researchers Curtis Puryear, Emily Kubin and Kurt Gray. "We may disagree on many issues, but underneath those disagreements lies a common moral sense: we all care deeply about protecting our friends, family and communities from harm." | | | Humans can learn to echolocate. For 10 weeks, researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 blind people to echolocate by producing mouth clicks and listening to the echoes of the sound bounce off objects. The participants then practiced evaluating the size or orientation of objects and navigating a maze. After echolocation training, both blind and sighted participants improved on both tasks, and both groups showed enhanced brain activity in their visual cortex in response to the sound of echoes.
Why this is interesting: Traditionally, the assumption has been that a blind person's brain must undergo some transformation to empower the other senses. But both the brains of sighted and blind people responded to echolocation training. The brain is not just for processing visual data, but can take in information from a variety of senses that aid spatial processing.
What the experts say: "This study adds a significant contribution to a growing body of evidence that this is a trainable, nonexotic skill that's available to both blind and sighted people," says Santani Teng, a psychologist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco. | | | • So far 36 human cases of bird flu (H5N1) have been reported in six U.S. states, though monitoring and testing for the virus is minimal. If bird flu does escalate into a full-blown pandemic, the U.S. government is prepared to vaccinate just 2 percent of the population, with no plans for how to produce and distribute more vaccines. H5N1 is a well-known and well-characterized virus, and in theory there could be a large bank of vaccines ready to go should it acquire the ability to spread easily from person to person. But such a vaccine bank does not exist, writes Maggie Fox, a health journalist. "Politicians who don't promote the need for pandemic preparations are gambling that the next one won't hit during their terms in office," she writes. | 6 min read | | | • Health care providers are using an AI transcription tool that hallucinates what people say. | AP News | | | • The U.S. is scaling up its battery storage, adding 20 gigawatts of battery capacity to the electric grid in the last few years. | The Guardian | | | • Funding has run out for a biobank of 12,000 strains of fungi collected since 1933. | CBC | • Piles of dead cattle that succumbed to bird flu are strewn along highways in Central Valley, Calif. (Warning: graphic images) | Los Angeles Times | | | In 2018, we published a fascinating article by researchers who had shown that people can shift their perspectives when arguing with people they disagree with by changing their conversation tactics. Rather than "arguing to win," participants in the study were told to "argue to learn." Those in the latter group reported that they felt less strongly that there was one objective truth after their conversations. Though some beliefs feel foundational to us and we'll likely never change our minds, this approach demonstrates that long-held beliefs are subjective. | This newsletter is for you! Email me and let me know how you like it and any other feedback: newsletters@sciam.com. Until tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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