In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a congressional hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”
But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being
A democratic New York City lawmaker last week introduced a bill to ban laundry detergent packs like Tide Pods – in the latest attempt to crack down on household goods because of climate change fears.
Stores and laundromats would face a fine of up to $1,200 for repeated violations.
It’s the latest in a series of green regulations that target household products, rules that have frustrated some consumers and business groups.
Detergent packs join the ranks of gas stoves, washing
It has been two and a half years since Britain scrapped its Covid mask mandates, the controversial law requiring face coverings in public spaces. But as cases rise again, Spain announced last week that compulsory mask-wearing will be reintroduced in hospitals in order to ‘protect healthcare workers’. So could masks stage a comeback here too?
Certainly, UK hospitals are battling similar pressures. Some have declared ‘critical incidents’ as cases of respiratory viruses rocket sixfold in a month. Several hospital trusts
Ancient tiny fossils from Australia may carry evidence of great power: the ability to make oxygen through photosynthesis.
The fossilized bacteria, dating from 1.73 billion to 1.78 billion years ago, are chock-full of structures that resemble those where oxygen-producing photosynthesis takes place in most modern cyanobacteria and in plants. Called thylakoid membranes, the structures are the oldest ever found, researchers report January 3 in Nature. The finding pushes back the evidence of thylakoids in cyanobacteria by 1.2 billion years.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent searching for cures for chronic diseases.
But there is a natural antidote that costs nothing and is available to everyone – exercise.
There is now definitive evidence that just 20 minutes of physical activity per day slashes the risk of cancer, dementia and heart disease by around a third.
That is more effective than some medications – and the exercise doesn’t have to be a yoga class or boring run on a treadmill,
Israel’s Defence Forces declared they have ‘split Gaza in two’ after armoured battalions surrounded Gaza City in preparation for a ground assault on Hamas.
‘Today there is north Gaza and south Gaza,’ Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters, calling it a ‘significant stage’ in Israel’s war against the Hamas militant group ruling the enclave.
Troops are now expected to enter Gaza City within 48 hours, according to Israeli press – an operation that would mark a new chapter of the
In her final moments with her dying son, Sheila Blanco placed her head on his chest and made a vow.
‘It was my last promise to him,’ she recalls. ‘I said I would find out what happened at any cost.’
She little envisaged how gruelling that quest would be – and how hard it would be to fulfil it. For while Sheila has long had a very good idea of what happened in her Cambridge-educated son Mark’s last moments, she
BRUSSELS
BY LEONIE KIJEWSKI
IT WAS AN UNUSUAL APOLOGY: from the office of the president of the European Council to a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
In a confidential evidence packet used by the European Union to justify freezing his assets, Viatsheslav Moshe Kantor’s nationality had been listed as “Jewish/Russian.”
A 70-year-old billionaire who once headed the Russian fertilizer giant Acron, Kantor stepped down as president of the European Jewish Congress after being sanctioned by the EU and the United Kingdom
Modified logs dating to about 476,000 years ago might be the oldest evidence of wooden structures, a new study finds.
Wooden artifacts decompose easily and are relatively scant in the archaeological record compared with stone or bone. The new finding, reported September 20 in Nature, suggests that the structural use of wood may stretch far back into the history of human ancestors, hinting at advanced cognitive skills and a less nomadic lifestyle for some hominids than previously thought.
It is perhaps Mexico’s most notorious cold case — 43 college students shot at by the police, forced into patrol cars, handed over to a drug cartel and never seen again.
The mystery has haunted the nation for nearly a decade. How could a relatively unknown gang pull off one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history, with the help of the police and the military watching the mass abduction unfold in real time?
A vast trove of about
