Lost to science for 89 years, a venomous primate has been sneaking into people’s homes and gardens
https://gizmodo.com/lost-to-science-for-...2000829535

EXCERPTS: Tiny, nocturnal, and expert at remaining hidden, the Bangka slow loris (Nycticebus bancanus) has spent nearly a century evading wildlife biologists around its native habitats on the Indonesian islands of Bangka, Sumatra, and Borneo. Before it vanished in 1937, this big-eyed creature was a member of the world’s only known group of venomous primates—via a bizarre toxin activated when the loris licks a gland on the inside of its upper arm, making its bite more dangerous or its fur poisonous via a little bit of defensive grooming.

But conservationists have finally tracked down the Bangka slow loris, a case of “lost” taxon presumed extinct, thanks to a series of wildlife rescues performed by Indonesia’s Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center between 2015 and 2025. Indonesia is home to multiple species of slow loris, including Sunda (Nycticebus coucang) and Kayan River (Nycticebus kayan) varieties, which may explain how the Bangka slow loris managed to avoid a scientifically confirmed detection across this decade of contact with the rescue center.

As the researchers noted in their new study, published this October in the journal Spixiana, as many as potentially 90 Bangka slow loris specimens were “identified at the species level by the Alobi staff based on fur colouration and the circumstances of the discovery.”

“What I find particularly astonishing is that such a charismatic and distinctive ⁠primate has received so little scientific attention for nearly a century,” study coauthor and biodiversity researcher Timon Glaw told Reuters. “After all, Bangka is just about an hour flight from Jakarta, one of the largest cities in the world.”

[...] Despite the long presumption of extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List status for the Bangka slow loris has conservatively remained “critically endangered,” and, for better and for worse, the new discovery of its survival does little to change that.

“Bringing the Bangka slow loris back onto the scientific radar is only the first step,” according to Glaw, who is currently a graduate student in biodiversity management and nature conservation at the Haus des Meeres Aqua Terra Zoo in Austria. He said they “urgently need a long-term conservation strategy built on population surveys, genetic studies and, above all, protection of its remaining habitat. The next challenge is to make sure it does not actually become extinct.” (MORE - missing details)

https://youtu.be/QdqZDB1E0u4

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/QdqZDB1E0u4

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...nce-policy

EXCERPTS: The American research enterprise is broken and in ways that not only hamper scientific progress but also harm the institutions that have grown dependent on the current system. The classic things to point to here would include the replication crisis as well as more general concerns about shoddy research practices, misuse of statistics, hype, and even outright fraud — problems that are more acute in some domains of research than others, including those, such as biomedical research, that directly impact the real world through drug development, clinical medicine, and public policy.

[...] The system dates back to World War II, after which there was a political debate [...] about what role the government was going to have in science during peacetime. [...] Such concerns intensified as federal funding soared in the post-war decades and became central to the financial model of the research university.

[...] But then beginning in the 1960s, you also had the environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-war, and student movements, growing concerns about automation and the pace of technological change — a general sense that technology was outstripping human control. ... Students called on scientists to divest from the “military-industrial complex”; the New Left urged more direct democratic control of science and technology.

[...] Starting in 1980 or so, private industry began to eclipse government as the primary research funder. The so-called Golden Age of science was over. But federal funding has nevertheless continued to grow and remain vital to academic science.

[...] So far, I’ve been sketching a fairly nonpartisan version of the “science is broken” narrative. That’s deliberate, to draw attention to the fact that the diagnosis is hardly unique to those on the right. But we’re talking about the Trump administration, and so the story isn’t complete without adding — and of course most on the right would lead with this — the charge that the current system enables, incentivizes, or fails to prevent gross politicization of science and the corruption of scientific research by “wokeism,” “radical environmentalism,” “reproductive justice,” or other ideological projects. These kinds of concerns are also longstanding but kicked into overdrive during the Great Awokening and the Covid-19 pandemic, when science was widely — and not without reason — seen by many on the right as becoming highly politicized... (MORE - details)

https://reason.com/video/2026/10/22/john...d-his-own/

INTRO: In 2016, the HBO comedian and political commentator John Oliver produced a terrific segment on how TV pundits routinely cite garbage science. After showing clips of newscasters and commentators making absurd claims such as, "A new study showing that drinking a glass of red wine is just as good as spending an hour at the gym," and The Today Show's Al Roker commenting, "You find the study that sounds best to you, and you go with it," Oliver commented, "No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no! You don't just get to cherry-pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway."

Then Oliver added a useful rule: "If they are going to keep saying 'a study says,' they should have to provide sourcing and context or not mention it at all." (Though the segment specifically targeted the misuse of "scientific" studies, all the same principles apply to the social sciences.)

What's so noteworthy about that 2016 segment is that in his other monologues, on issues ranging from SWAT teams to homelessness, Oliver has routinely ignored the principles he laid out. In his overly simplistic takes on complex policy issues (often designed to dunk on his ideological opponents for comedic effect), he often fails to provide appropriate context and appears to be guilty of choosing research "that sounds best," as Roker put it, or at least that supports whatever point he's determined to make.

Oliver is one of America's most influential pundits, so he should be held to the highest of journalistic standards. And Last Week Tonight is indeed more diligent than many TV news programs. The show employs researchers who interview the authors of the studies it cites. Oliver is a comic, not an academic, so we can excuse him for not posting footnotes, and he routinely cites his sources on screen. When we emailed the show's producers to point out problems with their research, to their credit, they sent back a detailed response that we'll quote from in this article. (In a few cases, they pointed to Reason articles using some of the same studies, albeit with full citations and more context. In cases in which their criticisms were correct, we've annotated the original articles.)

Many of the show's researchers are former reporters and editors who abide by journalistic standards. Nevertheless, the show has a long track record of citing social science findings without the appropriate context, massaging them to support whatever point Oliver is trying to make... (MORE - details)

COVERED: Rent ... Sports betting ... Homelessness ... Ethanol ... SWAT raids ... Tipping

https://youtu.be/Un_Gigu0mK8

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Un_Gigu0mK8

The idea of consensus being a sure establishment of what is objectively true and real is basically wrong. The only reason there is a consensus on certain states and ideas and phenomena among humans is because they are all the same, with the same brains and sensory organs and physical environments and languages. The unique and subjective Umwelt of a hairless bipedal language-using primate. Which no more means their consensually-shared experience is objectively true than that the consensually-shared experience of octopi is objectively true. It's how for us water is something we drink but for octopi it's something they breathe and live inside of. In the end there are as many consensually-shared and subjective interpretations of being-in-the-world (their Umwelts) as there are conscious creatures.

"The German term used to describe the unique, subjective perceptual world of a specific animal is Umwelt.
Coined by the pioneering biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, it literally translates to "environment" or "surrounding world," but in science and philosophy, it specifically refers to the unique "sensory bubble" that an organism inhabits based on its specific biological senses."--Google AI

"Agamben goes on to paraphrase Uexküll's example of the tick, saying:

'...this eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpoint [at the top of a tall blade of grass] with the help of only its skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odor of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick as a signal that causes her to abandon her post (on top of the blade of grass/bush) and fall blindly downward toward her prey. If she is fortunate enough to fall on something warm (which she perceives by means of an organ sensible to a precise temperature) then she has attained her prey, the warm-blooded animal, and thereafter needs only the help of her sense of touch to find the least hairy spot possible and embed herself up to her head in the cutaneous tissue of her prey. She can now slowly suck up a stream of warm blood.' "------- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt

We are only ever remembering our own subjective conceptualized interpretation of the world, not the objective world itself. An interpretation itself filtered again by our own editing and selectivity of our own memories of it. An interpretation that remains stable not because it is true or an accurate representation of reality or because it is consensually-shared but because it works in enabling us to live and survive. It is the phenomenal qualia of our conscious that don't change, not reality itself. Just as a bat or a bee's inner interpretation remains stable. We are thus living in a hallucinated 3D map of reality, and not reality itself. We are neither conscious subjects of the world, nor real objective beings. We are what navigates and moves and projects and maps itself onto reality from inside its own private map. We are agents--pure intentional energy-- not physical bodies OR conscious subjects. And we only ever know ourselves tacitly and intuitively not semantically.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2026/1...t-ice-age/

PRESS RELEASE: Two thousand years ago, the Arctic remnants of a once-vast ice sheet started to grow again. It was the beginning of a new glacial period, more conversationally known as the next ice age—but by the 1960s, summer temperatures were already so high that the ice sheet started to shrink. In other words, global warming ended a period of glaciation that had already begun.

"It was just getting started, everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen—and yet it stopped,” says Nicolás Young, a geochemist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of the Columbia Climate School. “It’s a very powerful example of how we have jolted the system.”

In a new study published in the journal Science, Young, fellow Lamont geochemist Joerg Schaefer and their colleagues describe their research on the Laurentide Ice Sheet, and his colleagues describe their research on the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada and the northern United States from about 95,000 to 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it stretched from above the Arctic Circle to Illinois, and in places the ice was over two miles thick.

The last vestige of the Laurentide still survives as the Barnes Ice Cap, now a Delaware-sized ice cap located on central Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. “People always say that it disappeared, but that’s not true,” says Young. And while it’s known that the Laurentide has repeatedly expanded and retreated across North America since widespread, continental-scale glaciation began about 2.6 million years ago, Young’s team wanted to know whether it had ever shrunk even smaller than it is now and then regrown.

(A note on terminology: Techincally we are still living in an ice age–the Late Cenozoic Ice Age–which started about 34 million years ago. Within it, colder glacial periods alternate with warmer interglacial ones, including the one we live in now. What people casually call an “ice age” is usually a glacial period. The last glacial period ended about 11,700 years ago.)

Reconstructing glacial histories is always difficult, and especially so when trying to reconstruct moments of maximum contraction and initial re-expansion: Apart from the challenge of identifying the origin point, whatever geological clues are left on the landscape tend to be scoured away as glaciers regrow. The cradle of the Laurentide, however, is a special case.

The Barnes Ice Cap is frozen directly to its underlying bedrock. Unlike most glaciers it does not slide, and thus preserves the vegetation that grew at earlier times when the glacier was small and was subsequently entombed by its expansion. Vegetation exposed since the glacier started retreating in 1960 can be sampled, allowing scientists to determine its age by analyzing traces of carbon-14, a harmlessly radioactive form of atmospheric carbon that collects in organisms while they live and breaks down at predictable rates after they die.

"If you do this enough times, you can actually develop a timeline of that ice margin systematically advancing over plants. You're actually tracking the expansion of that ice margin,” says Young.

By combining analyses of vegetation preserved beneath the Barnes Ice Cap and smaller recently-melted ice caps in the region, the researchers pieced together a climate history. The Laurentide reached its minimum dimensions about 3,000 years ago, then started re-expanding about 2,000 years ago when the climate became cold enough for ice to accumulate.

The researchers argue that this inflection point should be considered the beginning of Earth’s next glacial period. This interpretation challenges prevailing ideas about when glacial periods begin. Previous model-based studies have suggested that the next glaciation would not begin for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. Young and his colleagues argue that the first renewed growth of an ice sheet should count as the beginning, rather than waiting until enormous continental ice sheets have formed.

The findings are also a coda for climate scientists who in the 1970s made the controversial claim that a new ice age was imminent. “It actually was happening,” Young says. “They couldn't quite prove it, but now we sort of have the evidence.” It would have taken thousands of years for the cooling to be noticeable, and about 30,000 years for the Laurentide to regain its continent-sprawling mass, but the next glaciation had started, says Young.

By the 1960s Earth’s climate had warmed enough that the Barnes Ice Cap lost more ice in the summer than it added in winter. The next glaciation fizzled out. According to models of the glacier’s future, it will melt completely within the next few centuries. “That will be the true very last remains of the Laurentide, disappearing for good,” Young says.

Its disappearance could change the dynamics of future glaciations and ice ages. The Laurentide served as a glacial nucleation point when Earth’s climate cooled, as its frigid mass created self-sustaining feedbacks that caused more ice to grow on it. Scientists can’t say when the next glaciation might occur in a world with elevated freenhouse gas concentrations. But if continental ice sheets eventually begin growing again, they may have to do so without the last surviving remnant of the Laurentide.

"What has been an extremely natural and predictable phenomenon is now gone,” says Young.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.11...025-111050

PRESS RELEASE: Legalisation of recreational cannabis in the US is associated with a rise in hospital admissions for cardiovascular disease, finds an analysis of more than 50 million patient discharge records, published in the open access journal BMJ Open. Admissions for atrial fibrillation (abnormal heart rhythm), heart failure, and heart attack all rose faster after the law was enacted in the Western region of the US with the policy than in states without, the analysis shows.

Cannabis use has the potential to affect cardiovascular health through various physiological mechanisms, explain the researchers. And legalisation policies have been associated with more widespread use of cannabis products, particularly among older people who are already at heightened risk of cardiovascular problems, they add. As of June 2025, medicinal cannabis use was legal in 41 US states, while recreational use was legal in 24, they point out.

To gauge the potential impact of recreational cannabis laws on cardiovascular health, the researchers obtained data on hospital discharge diagnoses and patient demographics from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) for the years 2012-18 inclusive: NIS participating states cover around 97% of the US population. The researchers focused on the Western region of the USA (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming), because it began legalising recreational cannabis in January 2014.

This was nearly 5 years before other regions, so that by 2018, over 98% of people in the Western region lived in, or bordered, a state with legal cannabis sales. The researchers analysed hospital admission rates for acute heart failure, heart attack, atrial fibrillation/flutter, ischaemic (blood clot) stroke, venous thromboembolism or VTE for short (deep vein blood clot), and ventricular tachycardia (fast heartbeat).

For each of these diagnoses, they estimated baseline regional rates of hospital admissions per 100 000 people, using weighted NIS data for the 2 years before the first legal sale of recreational cannabis. They looked at these rates before and after legalisation in the Western region and compared these with other regions that hadn’t enacted the legislation. In all, they analysed data for 50,042,564 hospital discharge records between 2012 and 2018.

During the study period, people admitted to hospital in the Western region were overall younger (average age 51 vs 55), lived in higher-income ZIP codes (26% vs 19%) and less often identified as White. Before the legislation (2012–13), hospital discharge rates for the included diagnoses were lower in the Western region than in regions without the legislation. But these rates rose faster after legislation.

The estimated change in admission rates for each year of legal cannabis sales was statistically significant for atrial fibrillation (just over 2% higher), heart failure (nearly 4% higher), and heart attack (just over 3% higher), after adjusting for potentially influential factors. Rates for the other studied outcomes were higher, but not statistically significant.

This is an observational study, and as such, can’t establish cause and effect, and the researchers acknowledge various limitations to their findings. These include the inability to separate out individual states or look at the method of cannabis use (smoked or not). Nor were they able to account for trends in illegal use.

Nevertheless, they point out: “While several studies have examined the association of recreational cannabis legalisation on psychiatric conditions, substance use, emergency visits, and traffic accidents, ours is the first study to examine the association with [cardiovascular] hospitalisations.”

They add: “While an observational study cannot prove causality, our findings point to potential adverse effects of recreation legalisation on population health. Globally, our findings support a cautious approach to legalisation laws accompanied by data collection on [cardiovascular] outcomes.”

Have scientists finally found a way to save the banana from disaster?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-devel...m-disaster

EXCERPTS: Love them or loathe them, bananas are one of the world’s most popular fruit. But a combination of the climate crisis and new killer diseases have had growers concerned over the banana’s threatened extinction, something that would impose a huge toll on farmers in countries from Guatemala to Malawi, alongside eradicating a staple food.

Now researchers say they have made fresh advances in the race to save them from disaster. This month, Yelloway – a research collaboration between Chiquita, the world’s largest banana company, and the crop-improvement company KeyGene – announced it had developed a fully fertile Cavendish banana, meaning it may be possible, through cross-breeding, to create new banana varieties that are commercially viable and resistant to disease.

Second only to the tomato in terms of fruit consumption globally, the world grows about 139m tonnes of bananas a year. While there are more than 1,000 varieties, it is the Cavendish that is now found in most fruit bowls, taking over from the Gros Michel cultivar, which fell victim to Panama disease from the 1950s.

[...] Cavendish bananas have three sets of chromosomes, meaning they are typically sterile. “Combined with the ability to set fruit without pollination, this gives us the seedless banana,” said De Vega. There are several different types of Cavendish, including dwarf versions, which have arisen as a result of random mutations in the Cavendish genome.

But in each case new plants are grown from offshoots, so they are virtually genetically identical to the plant from which they came. While this results in uniform fruit, it also means they are vulnerable to the same diseases. Peter Stedman, Chiquita’s sustainability director, said: “We are not trying to preserve Cavendish. We’re trying to replace Cavendish because we believe at the core of any sustainable farming system is biodiversity and genetic diversity.”

Other researchers have taken different approaches. [...] But while it may result in disease-resistant progeny, he noted it could also yield a very different type of fruit.

“Whatever they generate is going to be different to Cavendish,” Dale said, pointing out that crosses could produce a huge range of types but any new variety needed not only to be resistant to disease but also produce high yields and taste good. (MORE - missing details)

---

Fruits and vegetables outperform medication for treating metabolic acidosis in chronic kidney disease
https://www.asn-online.org/about/press/r...eek202.pdf

PRESS RELEASE: In people with chronic kidney disease (CKD), oral sodium bicarbonate is a standard treatment for metabolic acidosis (too much acid buildup in the body), but results from a recent clinical trial indicate that dietary acid reduction with base producing fruits and vegetables may be a better option. The findings will be presented at ASN Kidney Week 2026 October 22–25.

In the trial, 108 adults with stage 3 CKD and metabolic acidosis were randomized to receive fruits and vegetables (to reduce dietary acid by half), oral sodium bicarbonate (also to reduce dietary acid by half), or usual care (36 patients in each group). Participants were followed annually for 10 years.

During follow-up, there were 115 hospitalizations, 166 emergency department visits, and 34 patients needed dialysis. Compared with the usual care group, the fruits and vegetables group had fewer hospitalizations (14 versus 64), fewer emergency department visits (20 versus 88), and less progression to dialysis (4 versus 16). There was no difference between those given sodium bicarbonate compared with usual care regarding these outcomes.

“Treatment of metabolic acidosis with fruits and vegetables was associated with more favorable long-term clinical outcomes and health care utilization than standard treatment with sodium bicarbonate or usual care, without increasing overall health-system or societal costs,” said corresponding author Nimrit Goraya, MD, of Baylor Scott and White Health.

“These findings support evaluating dietary interventions in chronic kidney disease not only at the individual-patient level but also at the population level, where the cumulative clinical and economic benefits may be substantial. They also highlight the potential quality-of-life and health-system value of investing in fruits and vegetables as a treatment strategy, particularly when favorable clinical outcomes can be achieved without increasing overall costs.”

Study: “Long-Term Outcomes and Health Care Costs of Fruits and Vegetables vs. Sodium Bicarbonate or Usual Care for Metabolic Acidosis in CKD: Post Hoc Analysis of a 10-Year Randomized Trial”