For decades throughout the opioid crisis, most doctors have relied on medication-heavy regimens to treat babies who are born experiencing neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. But a newer, simpler approach that prioritizes keeping babies with their families is gaining ground.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/23/common-treatment-for-opioid-exposed-babies-not-necessary/

As they traverse the Pacific Flyway, a strip of land that stretches along the Western coast of the Americas, migrating birds depend on wetland habitat. But in California’s Central Valley, 95 percent of those wetlands have disappeared. One program is paying farmers to bring them back.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/22/migratory-birds-need-habitat-california-farmers-can-help/

In the past eight years, activists have successfully pushed for tighter restrictions on so-called forever chemicals, culminating in sweeping regulations that affect drinking water and toxic site clean-up. What will the upcoming presidential election mean for those policies?

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/21/how-the-election-could-affect-toxic-chemical-regulation/

All history is environmental history, according to Sunil Amrith, an historian and the author of “The Burning Earth,” which traces the disparate, and often disastrous, efforts by civilizations as far back as the Mongol empire to control nature in the name of exploration, expansion, and development.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/18/book-review-the-burning-earth/

Microsoft announced a deal to revive Three Mile Island and buy all of the nuclear power plant’s electricity as the demands of its artificial intelligence data centers increase. One anthropologist asks whether a dying 20th century technology that didn’t fulfill its promises should be used to power a new and similarly uncertain one.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/17/opinion-irony-of-powering-ai-on-atomic-energy/

Connecting the dots between armed conflict and health is not straightforward. But researchers are developing creative techniques to gauge the extent of armed conflict’s public health harms — an endeavor they say is essential to inform short-term relief efforts as well as long-term policies.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/16/war-public-health-vast-impact/

The contagious nature of infections like strep throat or influenza is well understood. You’re at risk of catching the flu, for example, if someone near you has it. But what about a person’s mental health? Can depression be contagious? Research into those questions is hard to parse.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/15/cross-sections-depression-contagious-science-is-uncertain/

While some residents in hurricane-impacted areas can’t send texts or make calls, amateur radio enthusiasts are helping communicate requests for help and messages between loved ones.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/14/hurricanes-disrupt-phone-service-amateur-radio-comes/

In “Why Animals Talk,” zoologist Arik Kershenbaum casts a skeptical eye on grand claims about animal communication. Instead, he argues, the way information is conveyed is a product of the animal’s need to survive in specific circumstances, and is developed as far as it needs to be, no more and no less.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/11/book-review-why-animals-talk/

We humans harbor many cognitive biases — a legacy of the psychological adaptations early humans had to make to survive. In today’s world, could these deeply held thinking patterns be preventing us from breaking the harmful habits that fuel the many environmental threats facing Earth?

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/10/opinion-adaptations-to-an-older-world-climate-change/