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The researchers analyzed observations from experienced bird watchers of more than 4.3 million birds representing 82 species that included songbirds, raptors, waterfowl, and more. The majority of the birds became more abundant in urban habitats during the pandemic compared with previous years and ventured closer to major roads and airports. “It’s remarkable that across the whole bird community all sorts of different species that were really very different from one another all showed these changes in habitat use,” says Nicola Koper, a conservation biologist at the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute in Winnipeg....

While men account for less than half of all COVID-19 cases in the US (47.8 percent) according to the CDC, they make up 54.2 percent of COVID-19 deaths. In other countries, the disparity is much starker—men represent 73 percent and 70 percent of fatalities in China and Italy respectively, according to one paper. Scientists have been questioning the role of sex hormones, specifically testosterone, in COVID-19 severity since quite early on in the pandemic....

New Year’s resolutions are hard to keep, but in 2023, you may want to make more of an effort to be nicer to your bank account. Same you, cushier bank account. How does that sound? Tykr is an investing platform that can help you make smarter investments. It’s a stock screener and education platform that analyzes stocks for you, so you can make a decision about whether something is worth investing in....

Meet Kodu, a user-friendly approach to programming games that’s so simple even adults can comprehend it. Recently unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show, the system’s icon-driven interface lets you quickly build entire 3D universes from scratch. Starting with an empty world, players can resculpt terrain or add objects, characters, and buildings of varying size, shape, and color just by pressing a button. Commands are represented by pictures of each item or individual, easing newcomers into the process....

That’s why scientists want provisions for mobile marine protected areas—which can shift boundaries or restrictions depending on the movement of aquatic organisms—to be included in the upcoming revamp of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The convention hasn’t been updated since it was implemented in 1982, and marine ecologists like Sara Maxwell of the University of Washington are keen on using the update to bring ocean conservation into the 21st century....

Last weekend, employees at the Monterey Bay Aquarium noticed a female sea otter hanging out in the quiet shallows of the Aquarium’s Great Tide Pool. On December 20, she gave birth to a healthy (and adorable!) otter pup. Since then the mom and pup have left the tide pool presumably to get food, but not before Aquarium staff were able to catch some fantastic photo and video of the pair....

The new technology has the potential to help people without regular mental healthcare recognize and manage symptoms of mental illness. That’s a huge benefit at a time when mental healthcare is virtually unobtainable for around half of Americans living with mental illness, says Jason Moehringer, a clinical director at ClearView Communities, a residential treatment facility for people with serious mental illness, and co-founder of PsyberGuide, a website that provides evidence-based reviews of mental health applications....

When an outbreak of the disease first emerged last May, scientists and experts called on the WHO to change its name in an effort to avoid stigma and racist stereotypes associated with the disease. Monkeypox was named in 1970, 12 years after scientists first discovered the disease in captive monkeys. In 2015, the WHO published best practices for naming diseases. According to these best practices, “new disease names should be given with the aim to minimize unnecessary negative impact of names on trade, travel, tourism or animal welfare, and avoid causing offense to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups....

However, I’ve always found amusing some of the simple oversights — well maybe not exactly oversights, but somewhat puzzling technological limitations — inherent in the show. For example: Why does the artificial gravity (however that may work) seem to be always oriented in a sort of absolute “downward” direction? Because of this, whenever the Enterprise is knocked off its plane by weapons fire, everyone falls down the “slope”. Maybe the system just can’t adjust fast enough to changes in attitude, but wouldn’t an orientation continuously directly through the floor be more convenient (and easier)?...

This mouse madness has a laundry list of questions to answer. Led by principal investigators Fred Turek and Martha Vitaterna of Northwestern University at Evanston, Illinois, researchers at multiple institutions will examine how microgravity affects (or disrupts) the animals’ gut microbiome, gastrointestinal function, immune function, metabolism, and sleep and circadian rhythms. “We’re bringing biology to the space program,” says Turek, who has a long history helping NASA confront the physical challenges of spaceflight....

At 4:33 p.m. ET today, a classic scene may return (weather permitting) to Cape Canaveral after a nine-year hiatus. Two astronauts will don flight suits, climb into a vehicle perched atop a powerful rocket, and blast off toward the International Space Station (ISS). If all goes according to plan—at time of this publication, chances of favorable weather hover around 50 percent—the mission will mark two historic milestones. First, space veterans Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will become the first NASA astronauts to launch from American soil since the final Space Shuttle flight in 2011....

Tuesday morning, during the opening remarks for the JWST image releases, Webb Program Director Greg Robinson asked the audience on NASA’s Goddard Campus if anyone had seen the scene released last night. “Well,” he said, after people cheered enthusiastically. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The JWST team has released five images from its first six months of flight and observation. The telescope is the largest and most powerful observatory released into space, and part of its strength is its ability to capture visuals through infrared light—it adds depth that the human eye can’t detect....

People have always devoted a lot of thought to cleaning their backsides. As early as the 6th century, the Chinese scholar Yan Zhitui wrote that he preferred not to use paper containing quotations from the sages. The first task-specific toilet paper was invented in China in 1391. The sheets were initially intended for the royal family. They were big and perfumed. A 16th century French writer recommended “the neck of a goose that is well downed....

That’s what researchers at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, did in their recent pursuit of a pervasive diet myth: negative-calorie foods. They recently put their results on the preprint server biorxiv. In our endless pursuit to be physically smaller, we’ve all heard about fruits and veggies that supposedly require more energy to digest than they provide in calorie form. In theory, eating such a snack would not only fill your stomach without adding to your caloric intake for the day; it would also burn off some of the calories contained in other (hopefully tastier) food you ate....

Most of the birds that you see today come from dramatic evolutionary changes that radiated throughout the planet after the extinction of dinosaurs, says Guillermo Navalón, a paleobotanist from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, in an interview with Popular Science. “And [birds] recovered really quickly, within the first 10 million years or so,” he adds. Following this mass extinction, it’s believed that distinct water and land birds evolved....

The good news is, we’re (probably) not witnessing the start of a zombie apocalypse—but the news of Wednesday morning’s quarantine of a flight carrying more than 500 people at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York does point to a vector of disease transmission that freaks out the public. The Emirates jet departed from Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest transport hubs, at 3:21 a.m. local time....

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Archaeologists uncovered the 78,000-year-old funerary site at Panga ya Saidi, a cave near the Kenyan coast. There, researchers found the remains of a boy, about three years of age, who was gently laid to rest. They named him Mtoto, the Swahili word for child. Based on analysis of the remains, scientists concluded that Mtoto was likely set down curled up on his side. He was then probably wrapped in some sort of shroud and given a pillow (both of which later decayed), before being covered with soil....

Last Monday, the John Hopkins University tracker posted a staggering single-day count of 1,082,549 COVID cases, mainly out of the Northeast. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chalked this up to delayed reports from New Year’s weekend—but the daily numbers remained above 700,000 for the rest of the week. Some infectious disease researchers think that the US hasn’t even hit “the maximal period” in hospitalizations and mortalities from Omicron....

Orion’s solar array wing camera took the images at over 57,000 miles away from the Earth. They show the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) engine, which performed an outbound trajectory correction maneuver, which ensures that Orion is on the right path, earlier today. OMS is the main engine: a re-purposed engine that has flown 19 times in other space shuttle flights from 1984 to 2002, according to NASA. The picture also shows some of Orion’s eight auxiliary engines and one of its solar array wings, which use sunlight to generate power on the spacecraft....