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      Planet Sets Record for Hottest Day Twice in a Row

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      Researchers with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Sunday was Earth’s hottest day. Then it happened again on Monday.Monday was most likely the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, with a global average of about 62.87 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.15 degrees Celsius, preliminary data showed — beating a record that had been set just one day before.The data, released on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a European Union institution that provides information about the past, present and future climate, caused alarm among some experts.Earlier this week, the service announced that Sunday had set a record, with a global average of about 62.76 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.09 degrees Celsius. A day later it announced that Monday was the hottest day since at least 1940, when records began.Before this week’s back-to-back records, the previous record, 62.74 degrees Fahrenheit, or 17.08 degrees Celsius, was set last year, on July 6, besting a record that stood since 2016.Since Sunday’s and Monday’s temperatures were averages, some portions of the globe felt that extra heat more strongly, like parts of the Western United States where an excessive heat warning has been in place for days and is expected to continue for much of the week.“What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records,” Carlo Buontempo, the director of the service, said in a news release announcing Sunday’s record. “We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.”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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      Test Your Focus: Can You Spend 10 Minutes With One Painting?

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      Our attention spans may be fried, but they don’t have to stay that way. In a modest attempt to sharpen your focus, we’d like you to consider looking at a single painting for 10 minutes, uninterrupted. Our exercise is based on an assignment that Jennifer Roberts, an art history professor at Harvard, gives to her […] More

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      Moving In Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds

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      A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.But what if other things are just as damaging?Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.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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      This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

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      A small new study shows reactions in the brain in people who were given psilocybin in a controlled setting.If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.Sara Moser/Washington University School of MedicineThe image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”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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      Melodies of Popular Songs Have Gotten Simpler Over Time

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      “Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody,” Billy Joel crooned in “Piano Man,” his iconic 1973 barroom ballad. That may have been true enough when Mr. Joel wore a younger man’s clothes, but a new study conducted by computational musicologists at Queen Mary University of London has found that vocal melodies in popular music have become much less complex over time.The study, published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, used mathematical models and algorithms to pinpoint three “melodic revolutions” — in 1975, 1996 and 2000 — that brought increasing simplicity to the two main components of melody: rhythm, or the pattern of sounds and silences in a piece of music, and pitch, the measure of how high or low the notes are.The study looked at the top five Billboard songs every year from 1950 to 2023. Both rhythm and pitch became steadily less complex over that period, the study found. “Conservatively, they have both decreased by 30 percent,” said Madeline Hamilton, a graduate student at Queen Mary University of London who led the research.The 1975 hit “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille contains a lot of unexpected notes and rhythmic complexity.“Breathe” by Faith Hill, the top song of 2000, has no accidentals, lots of repetition and straightforward rhythms.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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      Alaska’s Juneau Ice Field Is Melting at an ‘Incredibly Worrying’ Pace, Scientists Say

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      The speed of decline in the Juneau Ice Field, an expanse of 1,050 interconnected glaciers, has doubled in recent decades, scientists discovered.One of North America’s largest areas of interconnected glaciers is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said Tuesday, in what they called an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought.The Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, lost 1.4 cubic miles of ice a year between 2010 and 2020, the researchers estimated. That’s a sharp acceleration from the decades before, and even sharper when compared with the mid-20th century or earlier, the scientists said. All told, the ice field has shed a quarter of its volume since the late 18th century, which was part of a period of glacial expansion known as the Little Ice Age.As societies add more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, glaciers in many areas could cross tipping points beyond which their melting speeds up rapidly, said Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University in England who led the new research.“If we reduce carbon, then we have more hope of retaining these wonderful ice masses,” Dr. Davies said. “The more carbon we put in, the more we risk irreversible, complete removal of them.”The scientists’ findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.The fate of Alaska’s ice matters tremendously for the world. In no other region of the planet are melting glaciers predicted to contribute more to global sea-level rise this century.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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      Robots Get a Fleshy Face (and a Smile) in New Research

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      Researchers at the University of Tokyo published findings on a method of attaching artificial skin to robot faces to protect machinery and mimic human expressiveness.Japanese researchers used living skin cells to make a flexible 3-D facial mold for a robot.via Shoji TakeuchiEngineers in Japan are trying to get robots to imitate that particularly human expression — the smile.They have created a face mask from human skin cells and attached it to robots with a novel technique that conceals the binding and is flexible enough to turn down into a grimace or up into a squishy smile.The effect is something between Hannibal Lecter’s terrifying mask and the Claymation figure Gumby.But scientists say the prototypes pave the way for more sophisticated robots, with an outward layer both elastic and durable enough to protect the machine while making it appear more human.Beyond expressiveness, the “skin equivalent,” as the researchers call it, which is made from living skin cells in a lab, can scar and burn and also self-heal, according to a study published June 25 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.“Human-like faces and expressions improve communication and empathy in human-robot interactions, making robots more effective in health care, service and companionship roles,” Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the study’s lead researcher, said in an email.The research comes as robots are becoming more ubiquitous on factory floors.There were 3.9 million industrial robots working on auto and electronics assembly lines and other work settings in 2022, according to the International Federation of Robotics.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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      A Global Push Fixed the Ozone Hole. Satellites Could Threaten It.

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      A sharp increase in hardware orbiting Earth could mean more harmful metals lingering in the atmosphere, according to a new study.Low-Earth orbit, a layer of superhighway that wraps around Earth’s thermosphere some 200 to 600 miles above our heads, is newly congested.Yet no one knows how the vast increase in satellites orbiting Earth will affect the atmosphere, and therefore life down below. With the rush to send up more and more satellites, a new study proposes that the hole in the ozone layer, a problem scientists thought they had solved decades ago, could make a comeback.“Up until a few years ago, this was not a research area at all,” Martin Ross, an atmospheric scientist at Aerospace Corporation, said of the study, which looked at how a potential increase in man-made metal particles could eat away at Earth’s protective layer.Ever since Sputnik, the first man-made space satellite, was launched in 1957, scientists have thought that when satellites re-enter our atmosphere at the end of their lives, their vaporization has little impact. But new satellites — much more advanced, but also smaller, cheaper and more disposable than previous satellites — have a turnover that resembles fast fashion, said the lead author of the study, José Pedro Ferreira, a doctoral candidate in astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California.Almost 20 percent of all satellites ever launched have re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in the last half-decade, burning up in superfast, superhot blazes.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