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/

Scientists say droughts, wildfires, and volatile weather threaten acequias — ancient irrigation ditches in the Southwest. To safeguard their unique system, irrigators are working on boosting acequias as a sustainable resource, and strengthening legal protections around water rights.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/09/new-mexico-ancient-water-system-survive-climate-change/

Aging dams built for flood control a half-century ago are at risk of being breached during today’s major rainstorms, resulting in massive damage. But the high price tag to fix what’s broken leaves rural areas with hard choices. One Wisconsin county is considering a controversial plan to dismantle all of their dams.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/08/thousands-dams-facing-climate-impacts-uncertain-fate/

A federal judge last week handed a major victory to opponents of water fluoridation — one that may highlight a path for other advocacy groups seeking to challenge environmental regulations. The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/07/fluoride-federal-ruling-epa/

Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin’s “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine” explores the myriad ways in which playing and listening to music can help to heal our bodies and minds, including its therapeutic benefits in treating trauma, depression, movement disorders, and other afflictions.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/04/book-review-i-heard-there-was-a-secret-chord/

Recent movements to ban books and modify school curricula will not be limited to subjects like U.S. history, argues C. Brandon Ogbunu in his column Selective Pressure. Biologists must recognize that these recent attacks on intellectual freedom are part of a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/03/opinion-authoritarian-new-war-on-ideas-biology/

Genetic research disproportionately focuses on people with European ancestry. New research suggests that having more diverse genetic data could allow physicians to better target certain medical treatments to patients in Latin America, including Indigenous groups.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/02/genetic-data-gaps-affect-indigenous-communities/

A 1970s theory proposed that baleen whales, like bowheads and humpbacks, travel in diffuse herds spanning up to hundreds of miles. Since then, anecdotes of whales seeming to coordinate behavior over long distances have circulated among the research community — but until recently, there has never been hard evidence.

via Undark Magazine https://undark.org/2024/10/01/long-distance-whale-synchrony-communication/