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      One-Third of World’s Trees Face Extinction Risk, Report at COP16 Says

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      They play an essential role in supporting life on Earth, but many species are in decline, researchers found.More than a third of the world’s tree species are threatened with extinction, according to the first comprehensive assessment of trees by the world’s leading scientific authority on the status of species.The findings, announced on Monday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, are especially sobering given the amount of life that trees sustain. Countless species of other plants, animals and fungi rely on forest ecosystems. Trees are also fundamental to regulating water, nutrients and planet-warming carbon.“Trees are essential to support life on Earth through their vital role in ecosystems, and millions of people depend on them for their lives and livelihoods,” Grethel Aguilar, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said in a statement.The tree assessment is considered comprehensive because it includes more than 80 percent of known tree species. In all, 38 percent were found to be at risk of extinction. More than a thousand experts from around the world contributed.Island biodiversity is particularly vulnerable, in part because those species often have small populations that exist nowhere else, and island trees accounted for the highest proportion of trees threatened with extinction. In Madagascar, for example, numerous species of rosewoods and ebonies are threatened. In Borneo, 99 species in the family of trees called Dipterocarpaceae are imperiled. In Cuba, fewer than 75 mature individuals of the red-flowered Harpalyce macrocarpa, known in Spanish as maiden’s blood, remain.Around the world, the biggest threats to trees are agriculture and logging, followed by urbanization, said Emily Beech, head of conservation prioritization at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a nonprofit group that led the research now included in the Red List.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Enigmas Seen With James Webb Space Telescope May Be Stellar Bullying Victims

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      Some 1,350 light-years from Earth, astronomers detected strange pairs of unexplained objects orbiting in the Orion Nebula. Since then, about 12 months ago, other scientists have proposed a new potential explanation for these apparitions, while other researchers wonder whether they exist at all.“There’s a bit less confidence they exist,” said Rosalba Perna, a theoretical astrophysicist at Stony Brook University. But “even just having one would revolutionize what we thought was possible” for star and planet formation.Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have started to reveal the Orion Nebula in glorious detail, showcasing the brilliant swirling clouds of dust and gas that will give rise to hundreds of stars in the next few million years.Two scientists, Mark McCaughrean at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and Samuel Pearson from the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, detected more than 40 pairs of objects similar in mass to Jupiter floating within the nebula. They named the objects Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.A James Webb Space Telescope image showing the spectrum of light from objects in the Orion Nebula, known as Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, among some of the fainter lines. The white dots in the image are bad pixels and cosmic ray hits, not stars.Mark McCaughrean (MPIA) & Sam Pearson (ESA)scienceThe JuMBOs suggested something was wrong in our understanding of star and planet formation. Stars form from the gravitational collapse of dust and gas, but JuMBOs appeared to be too small to have undergone this process, suggesting they formed as planets around stars that were then ejected. However, their presence in pairs complicates this scenario. It is unlikely that dozens of pairs of planets thrown from a star would end up orbiting one another because of their low gravitational attraction.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      82 American Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Kamala Harris

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      More than 80 American Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics have signed an open letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.“This is the most consequential presidential election in a long time, perhaps ever, for the future of science and the United States,” reads the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “We, the undersigned, strongly support Harris.”The letter praises Ms. Harris for understanding that “the enormous increases in living standards and life expectancies over the past two centuries are largely the result of advances in science and technology.” Former President Donald Trump, by contrast, would “jeopardize any advancements in our standards of living, slow the progress of science and technology and impede our responses to climate change,” the letter said.Eighty-two Nobel laureates — from a physicist who helped discover leftover light from the Big Bang to an immunologist who paved the way for one type of Covid-19 vaccine — have signed the letter. The laureates include the molecular biologist Gary Ruvkun, the chemist David Baker, the physicist John Hopfield and the economist Daron Acemoglu, all of whom won Nobels this month.Read the Letter from Nobel Laureates Endorsing Kamala Harris for PresidentMore than 80 American Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine and economics have signed an open letter endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.Read Document 4 pagesJoseph Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, drafted the endorsement. He said he was motivated by the “enormous cuts in science budgets” Mr. Trump proposed during his presidency, as well as what Dr. Stiglitz described as the former president’s “anti-science” and “anti-university” stances.While in office, Mr. Trump proposed a budget that would have led to a severe loss of funds for federal health and science agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Trump has suggested shutting down the Department of Education.“I hope it’s a wake-up call for people,” Dr. Stiglitz said of the letter. “A consequence of this election is the really profound impact that his agenda has on science and technology.”The letter also praised Ms. Harris’s recognition of the role that immigrants play in advancing science and technology, both nationally and on a global scale. Immigration has been a key issue in this year’s election, with both candidates promising a stricter approach than their prior presidential campaigns.Many scientists are inclined to “stick to their knitting,” Dr. Stiglitz said — focusing on their research rather than politics, and on knowledge for knowledge’s sake instead of the real-world applications that result from it.“But they’ve recognized this is a moment where you can’t be silent,” he said. More

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      Teens Think Movies and TV Shows Have Too Much Sex, Study Finds

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      At least that is what they told researchers at U.C.L.A. The high popularity of romance plots in movies and shows suggests otherwise.Movies and television shows about rich people are the last thing we want to watch. And skip the sex: We prefer content that focuses on platonic relationships. (There’s enough porn online as it is.) We do like fantasy as a genre, increasingly so. But please, pretty please, fix how you incorporate social media into story lines. It’s cringe.That is what young people — ages 10 to 24 — think about movies, television shows, video games and social media, according to a study released Thursday.The study, Teens & Screens, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that 63.5 percent of participants said they wanted content that depicted platonic relationships, as opposed to romance and sex. That is up from 51.5 percent last year. (Questions involving romance and sex were not shown to participants ages 10 to 13.)Of course, what study participants say and what they actually do can vary wildly. There is ample evidence to the contrary among shows that are popular with younger audiences, including “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a raunchy comedy; “Emily in Paris,” an impassioned romance; and “Tell Me Lies,” a steamy soap.Movies like “Poor Things,” which found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel, and the sexually frank “All of Us Strangers” attracted a surprisingly large audience of people in their early 20s, according to box office analysts.This year’s study was conducted in August and included 1,644 young people.“We’re trying to shift the culture by giving storytellers better information,” said Yalda T. Uhls, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, which is based at U.C.L.A. “The problem is often that Hollywood storytellers use their own memories of their teenage years or what their children in Los Angeles are doing, and that does not remotely represent what young people really want.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says

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      The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.That conclusion seemed to contradict an earlier description of the group, in which Dr. Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues noted that one quarter of the adolescents were depressed or suicidal before treatment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hairballs Shed Light on Tsavo Man-Eating Lions’ Menu

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      The Tsavo man-eaters terrorized railroad workers in British East Africa in the 19th century, but their tastes went well beyond human flesh.In British East Africa in 1898, two lions living along the Tsavo River were hungry.This was bad news for the workers building a railroad there. They would retreat to their tents at night and, come morning, some of the men would be missing, the latest victims of big cats that had a hankering for human meat.“Bones, flesh, skin and blood, they devoured all, and left not a trace behind them,” wrote Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, a British Army officer leading the railroad project.During the nine-month reign of the Tsavo man-eaters, the lions, which like most males of the area lacked manes, devoured around 35 workers. Eventually, construction of the railroad stopped completely until Colonel Patterson shot the two cats.The lions’ bodies were initially fashioned into trophy rugs. In 1925, the Field Museum in Chicago purchased the rugs for display. The two skulls ended up in the museum’s collection.It turns out that the Tsavo lions had a taste for more than men. Using hair fragments preserved in the lions’ broken teeth, scientists discovered DNA from several species. Their findings were published Friday in the journal Current Biology, offering a snapshot of the surprisingly diverse buffet of wildlife once consumed by a top predator in what is today Kenya.In the 1990s, Thomas P. Gnoske, a collections manager at the Field Museum, got a chance to examine the Tsavo lions’ skulls. He noticed hair fragments in the cats’ cracked canine teeth. In 2001, Mr. Gnoske contributed to a paper positing that the lions had developed a preference for human prey because the cats’ teeth were damaged, and our species’ flesh was easier to chew.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Considered ‘Moderate Drinking’?

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      That depends on whom you ask, and what country you live in. Here’s what the research suggests and how to think about it.Over the past several years, there has been a rise in alcohol-related deaths and a steady wave of news about the health risks of drinking. Calls for people to drink only in moderation have become more urgent. But what, exactly, does that mean?“Tongue in cheek, people have defined it as not drinking more than your doctor,” said Tim Stockwell, a scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research.More officially, in the United States, moderate drinking is defined as one drink or less per day for women and two drinks or less per day for men. But other countries define moderate drinking, also called low-risk drinking, differently, and recent research around alcohol’s health harms has raised questions about current guidelines.How are the guidelines set?Experts used to think that low or moderate amounts of alcohol were good for you. That assumption was based on research showing that people who drank in moderation lived longer than those who abstained or drank excessively. The longevity benefit disappeared around two drinks a day for women and three drinks a day for men, Dr. Stockwell said.But many researchers now think that those conclusions were based on data analyses that had “all kinds of methodological problems,” said Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, a professor of nutrition and medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.For example, one issue was that many people who abstained from alcohol did so because they had existing health problems, while people who drank moderately were more likely to have healthy lifestyle habits. It created “really what was an illusion of health benefits with low to moderate amounts of drinking,” Dr. Mayer-Davis said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Have We Reached Peak Human Life Span?

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      After decades of rising life expectancy, the increases appear to be slowing. A new study calls into question how long even the healthiest of populations can live.The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span.“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Chicago at Illinois, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More