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Is there a link between social media and depression? Do Facebook and Instagram have a negative impact on your mental health? It’s complicated. Sometimes, scrolling through Instagram just makes you feel bad. You try not to envy your friends, but they always seem to be traveling somewhere cool, eating something fancy, or looking cute in perfect just-rolled-out-of-bed hair. On the other hand, there are times when you laugh at funny memes, catch up with old friends, and feel happy to belong to fun social media communities....

When I started my pediatric genetic practice over 20 years ago, I was frustrated by constantly having to tell families and patients that I couldn’t answer many of their questions about autism and what the future held for them. What were the causes of their child’s particular behavioral and medical challenges? Would their child talk? Have seizures? What I did know was that research was the key to unlocking the mysteries of a remarkably heterogeneous disorder that affects more than five million Americans and has no FDA-approved treatments....

I took on my first “boss” role a couple of years ago while overseeing a tiny cadre of junior-level editors at a national women’s magazine. The media industry isn’t exactly known for having easy managers—ever read The Devil Wears Prada?—and I hadn’t had any formal management training in my 10 years in the business. So I governed mostly by the Golden Rule and by asking myself, “WWWD?” as in “What would Wendy—a great former boss of mine—do?...

Direct Suppression Try to block out all thoughts of a certain memory. Increases activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (orange), which mediates working memory and cognitive control. Reduces activity in the hippocampus (blue), an area important for conscious recollection. Thought Substitution Try to forget by substituting the unwanted memory with a more desired one. Increases activity in the left caudal prefrontal cortex (green), thought to decrease saliency of intrusive memories, and the midventrolateral prefrontal cortex (red), which helps to retrieve a specific memory....

Public Health The Urgent Need to Improve Health Equity A special package highlights problems and solutions June 1, 2022 — Lauren Gravitz Mental Health Mental Health Care Should Be Available for All, Not a Luxury The stress of COVID fractured a system that was already cracked June 1, 2022 — Sarah Sloat Inequality Discrimination Is Breaking People’s Hearts Heart attacks, strokes and other consequences of cardiovascular disease are particularly dangerous for people who face inequity...

For decades bear biologists have known that bears engage in a delightful ramble variously dubbed “sumo strutting,” “cowboy walking” or, simply, the “bear dance.” Many researchers have guessed at the reason, but a recent study finally offers solid clues. As they walk, the bears vigorously twist their feet into the ground. Sometimes they step into footprints left behind by other bears after giving the prints a good sniff. Some have referred to these collective tracks as bear highways because they become well traveled over time....

When American novelist David Foster Wallace delivered the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, he urged the graduating class to “exercise some control over how and what you think.” If you don’t at least try to regulate your thoughts and behaviors, Wallace cautioned, you will go through life “dead, unconscious, a slave to your head.” Wallace himself long suffered with unwanted negative thoughts and crippling self-doubt—and took his own life three years after that speech....

By Jon CartwrightA single photon can now be split into three, thanks to the work of an international team of physicists. The achievement could open up new avenues in the field of quantum information.The ability to split photons may not sound as extraordinary as other achievements in quantum physics, but for decades it has proved crucial to the success of many experiments. Often researchers need to know that photons are emitted at precisely the same time and are in phase with each other, and this is almost impossible if the photons come from separate sources....

Education generally focuses on what you study, such as algebra, the elements of the periodic table or how to conjugate verbs. But learning how to study can be just as important, with lifelong benefits. It can teach you to pick up knowledge faster and more efficiently and allow you to retain information for years rather than days. Cognitive and educational psychologists have developed and evaluated numerous techniques, ranging from rereading to summarizing to self-testing, for more than 100 years....

Peer closely enough, and everything begins to look granular. Trees are made largely of quarks. Sunbeams are swarms of photons. Phones run on streams of electrons. Physicists have detected particles of matter, light, and most forces—but no experiment has yet unveiled gravity’s grainy side. Many physicists assume that gravity must come in particles but that these massless “gravitons” interact with familiar particles too weakly to detect. To confirm the existence of gravitons, some theorists suggest searching for them when they gather in hordes surrounding intense gravitational events such as black hole mergers....

Mobile devices have become our alarm clocks and newspapers and, via platforms like Facebook and Instagram, portals to our social lives. With smartphones inhabiting the pockets of roughly three quarters of all Americans and tablets borne by half, a pale blue glow silhouettes modern life. As screens have become ubiquitous, so has the phenomenon of depressed or suicidal teens, notes Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University and the author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood....

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will reconvene a science advisory panel shut down by the Trump administration. New York, along with other states involved in a climate policy network to counterattack the federal government’s retreat on carbon regulation, will reconstitute the federal advisory committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. Cuomo will announce the move today during his annual State of the State speech in Albany. The committee includes academics, corporate representatives and other stakeholders....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the story with the Florida Panther these days? Is it still teetering on the brink of extinction, or is it on the rebound? —Alex T., via email One of more than 20 subspecies of cougar and native to the southeastern United States, the Florida Panther is most certainly still highly endangered. Biologists estimate that less than 100 of the animals are alive in the wild today, hanging on in the southern tip of Florida below the Caloosahatchee River....

Influenza has been called “the last great plague of humankind” because it still poses a serious health threat to our nation and the world. If a naturally occurring variant of a bird flu virus acquired the ability to replicate in the trachea and nose of humans, it would cause a pandemic, with consequences as potentially devastating as the 1918 flu, which killed 50 million people. Because influenza viruses are found in birds and many mammalian species, it will not be possible, as it was for smallpox, to wipe influenza from the face of the earth....

The loss of forest has wrought dramatic consequences for biodiversity and is the primary driver of the global extinction crisis. I work in Borneowhere huge expanses of tropical forest are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. The biological cost is the replacement of some 150 forest bird species with a few tens of farmland species. But forest is also frequently retained inside or at the edges of oil palm plantations, and this is a pattern that is replicated globally....

From Soul Cycle to OrangeTheory to BodyPump to PureBarre we have covered many of the most current fitness trends in 2018. From push-ups to squats to burpees to slouching to the dangers of stretching, we have looked at many ways to move our bodies and how we can improve on what we already know. From our DNA to our HRV to EMS devices to HIIT, we have dissected many acronyms and looked at how they can improve our fitness lives....

The Arctic Ocean is freezing up at a slower pace than ever before, with the extent of sea ice at a lower level this fall than in all previous years, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported this week. The North Pole averaged 2.5 million square miles of ice in October. That’s 154,400 square miles less than the previous record set during October 2007. Scientists said that as of early November, the ice levels remained especially low in Alaska’s Beaufort and Chukchi seas and Russia’s East Siberian and Kara seas....

SAN DIEGO—Republican Mayor Kevin Faulconer confronted the issue of climate change not long after taking office in this coastal city. Faulconer, 49, became mayor in 2014 after winning a special election to replace former Mayor Bob Filner (D). The list of decisions for the new GOP leader included whether to support an expansive climate action plan. Every city in the state is required to have a climate road map as part of its general plan....

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will not enter new collaborations with Russian scientific institutions following a request of Ukraine‘s scientists to halt partnerships with Russian science institutions in response to Russia‘s military invasion of their country. CERN operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world including the famous Large Hadron Collider, which discovered the so-called “God particle,” the Higgs boson, in 2012. Founded in 1954, CERN currently has 23 member states and 7 associated member states; Ukraine is one of the latter whereas Russia is not a formal member of the organization....

Scientific American: Is climate change a problem? Bjorn Lomborg: Yes, it’s a problem and it’s man-made because of the burning of fossil fuels. We need to fix it but we need to fix it smartly. SA: In your 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist you concluded that the threat of climate change was overblown. What has since convinced you that it is indeed a real threat? BL: I don’t agree with that assessment, already then I pointed out that it was a real problem....